VASTlint
VAST-4.1-macro-deprecated

VAST-4.1-macro-deprecated

[CONTENTPLAYHEAD]/[MEDIAPLAYHEAD] are deprecated as of VAST 4.1 — use [ADPLAYHEAD]

InfoMacrosIAB VAST 4.1 §6VAST 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3

Short answer

[CONTENTPLAYHEAD] and [MEDIAPLAYHEAD] were deprecated in VAST 4.1 in favour of [ADPLAYHEAD], which unambiguously reports the playhead within the ad. Newer players may not populate the deprecated macros.

Why this matters in production

This rule is advisory rather than fatal, but it still matters for portability, debugging speed, and keeping tags predictable across different buyers and playback stacks. Macro rules catch substitution problems in tracking, click, and error URLs. A misspelled, mis-cased, or out-of-context macro is never replaced by the player, so the server receives literal placeholder text instead of the measurement value, and unencoded characters can break the request entirely. Affected scope: VAST 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3.

Invalid

<Tracking event="progress" offset="00:00:10"><![CDATA[https://t.example.com/p?ph=[CONTENTPLAYHEAD]]]></Tracking>

Valid

<Tracking event="progress" offset="00:00:10"><![CDATA[https://t.example.com/p?ph=[ADPLAYHEAD]]]></Tracking>
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Other Macros rules

VAST-2.0-macro-unknownURL contains a [MACRO] that is not a recognised IAB VAST macroVAST-2.0-macro-lowercaseRecognised macro is not uppercase — players match macro names case-sensitivelyVAST-2.0-macro-wrong-contextContext-restricted macro ([ERRORCODE]/[REASON]) used where it has no defined valueVAST-2.0-macro-uri-unencodedMacro-bearing URL contains characters that must be percent-encoded per RFC 3986