The Why and How of Dynamic Creative Optimisation

It is pretty common knowledge that dynamic display advertising and creative optimisation (DCO) technologies can boost campaign performance.  Technology is enabling marketers to reach the right person at the right time with increasing effectiveness.  Many case studies show an increase in CTR well above 100% vs. non-personalised creative, and decreases in cost metrics of 60 – 70%.

But in addition to more click-throughs and conversions, DCO can engage the viewer providing an added level of confidence in online advertising and even potentially a competitive advantage for the publisher.  For example, the Guardian recently announced more targeted marketing on its website with promotions for its dating service Soulmates and holiday deals tailored based on user behaviour.

Chris Lawson, the Guardian's content sales and marketing director, said: "If we know someone is a new customer that has never visited the site before, is promoting a subscription to our iPhone app to them as relevant as pointing it to someone that's been on the site 25 times? Of course it's not. This is about trying to show users the most relevant offers so they get the most useful experience from our site."
The company hopes the strategy will be a driver in helping digital revenues double to nearly £100m by 2015.

How does DCO work?

DCO enables the economical and rapid design, deployment and measurement of an infinite number of creative variations that can be inserted into online ads when and were they are needed..  Using a template approach, DCO provides an ability to generate display ads on the fly, decreasing the cost and time of creative production and media management by automating many of the manual tasks that go into the production of every banner.

With DCO more specific and relevant messages are displayed, for example destinations for travel tickets based on a viewer's location and previous browsing sessions, or the nearest location of a car dealership based on an IP address.  DCO might even decide within a product to feature more premium items for more affluent users, or feature images tailored to warmer or colder climates to match the user’s own environment.

Highly interactive user elements and live advertiser product data and promotions are integrated based on external data sources including ad user interaction rates, and user time spent with the dynamic ad, (dwell time).  DCO uses advanced algorithms that learn over time – and in real time -  which creative is working best with a given audience and automatically substitute the most successful variants for that audience. Should preferences change, the algorithm adapts and conducts further substitutions. 

Although the promise of DCO is here, there are changes which need to take place to take advantage of the full opportunity.

Barriers to success have included requiring agencies and advertisers to adapt to a separate workflow that isn’t streamlined with the rest of their marketing activities.   In addition, sophisticated creative optimisation campaigns with thousands of different ad variations are still a new and unfamiliar territory that advertisers and agencies alike don’t always know how to handle.  Online display campaigns with a limited amount of creative concepts and translated into dynamic creative implementations aren’t the best candidates for DCO.

The new mindset of creative optimisation and changing campaign philosophies:

Optimisation doesn’t replace strategy – Advertisers know their audiences best and need to have built in market knowledge to ensure that each ad served will touch a chord with the target audience.
Plan target audience messaging strategy – Target audiences and preferences need to be researched thoroughly to generate a large volume of equally realistic potential outcomes
Analyse the sales cycle through each stage of the funnel – Promotions need to be created that will drive a conversion or take an audience to the next step.
Keep it fresh – DCO messages and promotions need to be fresh and react in real time to ongoing events.
Big brother alert – Seeing a message like “Hi David, don’t you want to buy that beautiful sofa you just saw” can make someone really uncomfortable – advertisers need to follow acceptable guidelines and be sensitive to privacy issues.
Integration – Dynamic Creative Optimisation tools that are well integrated into ad servers provide efficiency and scale that can boost performance.

Article submitted by MediaMind