Guidelines >Technical Guidelines

The following are a list of general technical guidelines that must be adhered to when advertising on any of ESPN's digital properties.

• The advertising content must be clearly identifiable as an advertisement, as opposed to a link within ESPN site content. Advertisers must be clearly identified by name in at least one frame of the advertising content.
• Ad units that have a white or partially white background must be bound by a visible one pixel non-white box built into the graphic. Creative must still meet size specifications with border.
• Third-party creative/ad tags must have a z-index set below 999999. CSS Overflow settings cannot be set to visible.
• All advertisers must have a privacy policy, no more than one click from the linking page to the ad unit.
• Ad units must have a linking URL that resolves to an active page.
• All third-party, and/or site-served creative must open a new window or browser tab.
• Flash cookies are not permitted in any advertisement running on ESPN.
• Alt text cannot exceed 30 characters max.
• User initiated audio is allowed. Host initiated sound is not allowed.
• Any expanding creative must have the user-initiated expand occur on click only. Creative with roll-over to expand will not be accepted.
• Placeholder or non-final ad content will not be considered as "proxies" for final creative.
• Any third-party billed execution containing more than one ad unit must include third-party tags or tracking for all units. ESPN will bill off of first-party numbers if this requirement is not met.
• All ESPN video ads will be encoded for easier distribution across all platforms. Process and output specs can be found here.