Time to Get Personal with Dynamic Creative
No two customer journeys are exactly alike so why do creative placements treat it as such? According to a recent Forbes article highlighting 2019 technology trends, “These days, customers expect brands to understand what they’re interested in, their position in the customer journey and their relationship with the brand.” Enter: Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO).
Utilizing Dynamic Creative (Optimization) elevates traditional programmatic display or video placements by delivering timely, relevant, and user-specific ads to those engaging with the media. Dynamic meets media viewers where they are in their customer journey, at each stage of the funnel. Meeting consumers or potential customers where they are instead of serving a generic message is key when attempting to maximize Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
How does Dynamic Creative work for those viewing my media?
Several elements can go into a prospecting or retargeting Dynamic Creative strategy that trigger real time creative updates for a personalized experience – weather, geography, day part, audience targeting – to name a few. Retargeting power is heightened when you can pinpoint cart abandoners with a carousel of items that previously piqued their interest. Further, you may choose to customize pricing displayed to certain media viewers that previously had purchased on an incremental buy structure, rather than a one time lump sum.
Brian Francis, Director of Programmatic Advertising at Vehicle, describes engagement in two main phases, “On the engagement side the question would be what can we leverage from a programmatic perspective that can help grab the attention of the target by leveraging something familiar. This could be leveraging location, context, weather, time of day, group association, etc. The second is relevance. The question here is to align product or service benefits to the audience segment you are addressing. This can be leveraging demographic, psychographic, life-stage, presence of children or competitive insight.”
How do we set up Dynamic Creative?
Colton Dirksen, Head of Business Development at Adacado, offers advice for advertisers implementing Dynamic Creative for the first time stating, “advertisers starting out in Dynamic Creative don’t need to have to go all in at once…for instance, many of the advertisers using Adacado’s platform start by delivering simple efficiency gains and then post-launch, they’ll incorporate more creative targeting to increase message personalization, delivering higher ROAS.”
Setting up Dynamic Creative is an iterative process with multiple parties involved. According to Nicole Perrin from Emarketer, “Brands must take the lead, set expectations, and manage the process to ensure success.” A data feed controls the triggers and logic laid out in the prospecting and retargeting strategies to enable these real-time creative updates. Colton Dirksen describes a data feed as “a document that contains structured information around products, vehicles, flights, jobs or other list of items. A data feed also includes attributes associated with each of the products/offer, such as images, titles, descriptions, and URLs. A feed is typically created to supply the content required to build websites in an automated fashion. These same data feeds may be used to automate the creation of digital display ads.” Collaboration between agencies, creative partners, and brands is key to getting the creative up and running between the strategizing, technical, and testing/editing stages.
Through all the technical aspects of DCO, we cannot forget about the customer. Perrin comments on the importance of heeding the privacy of consumers and their data, “Consumer data is at the heart of much Dynamic Creative Optimization, and that means putting privacy and security issues at the center.”
We ran Dynamic Creative for our campaign. Now what?
Like traditional creative updating and testing, Dynamic Creative strategy is never fully complete. Dynamic Creative allows necessary creative testing and revamping in ways that traditional A/B testing cannot deliver. Not to mention, as Colton Dirksen confirms, that the creative process is much more efficient with advanced creative build technology which “decreases DCO creative build hours from 16 to 12 to 8 to 4” and in the case of the Adacado “new self-serve platform under an hour.” The efficiencies in the Dynamic Creative build process, like the service offered by Adacado, are essential to consider when calculating ROAS.
In addition to creating efficiencies in time and spend, running DCO for a given campaign opens a door to a robust data pool. Advertisers have a number of metrics at their fingertips: conversion or engagement performance by type of weather, time of day/day of week, creative messaging, creative images, and any other metrics an onsite pixel can pass back. As for advertisers, with more data comes more responsibility to our customers to deep dive into the information and consistently re-evaluate prospecting, retargeting strategies, and creative messaging to deliver the most personalized content possible.
Fortunately, partners like Digilant can help guide interested advertisers through the DCO process, including analyzing data to make appropriate optimizations or recommendations for maximum return. Please reach out to Digilant to chat strategy or mock up your creatives for your campaigns here.