Dynamic Creative & DCO in Advertising Explained (In Plain English)

So you’re trying to make sense of what DCO (dynamic creative optimization) is.

And yet, despite how simple that sounds, there’s a lot of confusion in the market about what DCO actually is and what role it’s supposed to play in an advertising strategy.

Here are some popular definitions from platforms with DCO offerings:

“Dynamic creative optimization, or DCO, is a type of programmatic advertising that allows advertisers to create personalized ads based on real-time data. DCO is a powerful tool that can help marketers create more relevant and effective ads.” – AmazonAds

“Dynamic creative takes multiple media, such as images and videos, and multiple ad components, such as images, videos, text, audio and calls-to-action, and then mixes and matches them in new ways to improve your ad performance. It allows you to automatically create personalized creative variations for each person who views your ad, with results that are scalable.” – Facebook

The trouble with these definitions is that they make significant omissions about what the value of dynamic creative really is. These omissions cause advertisers to think “this doesn’t apply to me”, making them miss out on the performance and efficiency offered by DCO.

Dynamic creative can deliver significant value to advertisers. It can give multiplicative boosts to performance with very minimal effort and investment. It can also minimize workloads and enable turnaround times the likes of which you may have never thought possible.

In this post, we’ll be breaking down each component of DCO step by step. By the end, you’ll understand the basics of dynamic creative as well as all of the logistical and strategic benefits it provides which are often left a mystery.

What is creative and what is its role in advertising?

Ad creative, or simply “creative”, broadly refers to the media elements that make up a complete ad. This includes images, font selections, and copywriting – but can also include videos, sounds, and other elements depending on the advertising medium.

The first and most important role of creative in advertising is to get attention. Without a viewer’s attention, the message of an ad can’t be delivered. An equally important factor for creative is being relevant. If a message isn’t relevant to a viewer, they won’t care about it and won’t act.

It’s the aim of most advertisers to find new ways to boost the performance of their media programs, and one very direct way of doing this is making optimizations at the creative level.

However, it’s easier said than done to optimize creative without the right infrastructure.

On a media platform, think about how many different audiences an advertiser can have. Then, think about how many different personas within each audience there can be. Then think about how many different products or services an advertiser can have. Now what happens if you want to A/B test different messages?

There are also design and production processes that need to be carried out to meet all of these creative needs. Not to mention all of the ad trafficking that needs to be done so that the right message can meet the right person at the right time.

In one word, optimizing creative is complicated.

When you factor in design, production, and media planning, it can also be slow and expensive.

We need a way to make optimizing creative simple, fast, and affordable.

What is a dynamic template?

Dynamic templates are the foundational framework that allows the content of an ad to be customized in real-time. Templates allow ad elements like images, text, and videos to be assembled in different combinations that deliver personalized messaging when an ad is served.

Templates can be thought of like a blueprint or a schematic with markers on it to indicate where certain components should go. The template acts as an outline for where different pieces of a finished ad should be placed – but it doesn’t restrict or define the specifics of each component.

For example, a template can ensure that a border is always present around the edge of the creative. If an advertiser wanted to test if a yellow border would attract more attention than a blue one, that color variant could be used for the “border component” of the template.

Dynamic templates apply this concept in the same way to ad elements like images, text, and videos as each element is selected to compile a complete ad that’s displayed to a viewer.

When we review the factors that make creative optimization complicated:

• Multiple audiences and personas
• Multiple products and services
• A/B testing
• Design and production
• Trafficking

The common bottleneck that creates this complexity is messaging scale.

Dynamic templates provide the fundamental infrastructure needed to deliver any number of personalized messaging variants – overcoming the scale bottleneck. When loaded with branded assets, dynamic templates do this without compromising a brand’s look and feel.

In other words – when it comes to creative optimization, templates make it simple.

In addition to serving as the backbone for DCO, templates also make it possible to make use of new capabilities that help to boost performance beyond what static JPEGs are capable of.

As mentioned earlier, creative’s primary role is getting attention.

Templates enable advertisers to animate creative elements to draw even more attention to their ads through the use of eye-catching motion. Animations also allow advertisers to cycle through multiple text and image combinations, giving them an extended canvas with which to deliver relevant and personalized messaging.

Interactive template elements like clickable carousels can also make it possible to showcase multiple aspects of a product, or multiple different products within a single ad unit. The same concept has versatile application when multiple locations for geo-based targeting are involved.

Additionally, presentation options like splash frames, inserts, and call outs can drastically reduce the time needed to update promotions that change regularly.

While templates serve as the creative “floor plan” for dynamic messaging, we still need a way to organize all of the different creative elements we plan to use. This is where dynamic content feeds get added to the mix.

What is a dynamic content feed?

A dynamic feed serves as an organized repository where all of the details about individual creative elements are stored. These details determine which assets are used in a template during the ad serving process.

A dynamic feed is generally a simple spreadsheet document, which contains organized rows and columns of data that are used to reference each creative element. Within enterprise-grade setups, a dynamic feed can also sometimes involve a more advanced series of connections that pull in data from various platforms via an API.

In addition to its role in pointing to where creative elements and data is stored, a dynamic content feed is also responsible for outlining the decisioning logic rules that accompany each creative element. These rules determine when certain elements should be included in an ad.

Let’s expand on the “blueprint” analogy from earlier.

If templates are the “blueprint” for creative elements, a dynamic content feed is the “assembly guide” that coordinates the “building” process. It indicates when certain components should be used, which variants should be selected, and where all of the different components are stored.

Because design processes can be very modular in nature for dynamic messaging strategies, it’s important to keep an organized repository of all creative assets.

Dynamic feeds make it possible to sort and store hundreds or even thousands of different creative messages, images, products, offers, promotions, and other elements. By combining all of these assets in different ways, advertisers are able to achieve infinite creative versioning.

The ability to assemble personalized messaging on the fly allows advertisers to connect sophisticated creative messaging strategies that align perfectly with the programmatic targeting options of their DSP.

In other words, a dynamic feed is a bridge that allows advertisers to transport massive volumes of personalized creative in an organized way into their media platforms of choice – enabling a connection between their creative strategy and their media targeting plan.

Now that we know how feed-driven content is used to power templates, the broader applications of dynamic creative optimization are much easier to put into practice.

What is DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization)?

Dynamic creative optimization involves the programmatic selection of feed-driven creative elements to fill an ad template. This practice allows targeted ad variants to be generated in real-time at the time an ad is served, increasing personalization at scale.

The end result is being able to serve hyper-personalized ads to viewers, rather than sending static ads which don’t include any modular elements that can be shifted on the fly.

In other words, DCO is the term used when everything we’ve covered so far comes together and is put into practice to meet different use-cases.

Dynamic creative is a complete departure from static creative. It allows advertisers to avoid using “one-size fits all” messaging tactics. Media strategies often involve detailed targeting, and sending the same message to every target fails to make full use of the technology’s capabilities.

By using ideal creative that aligns with media targeting, businesses are able to maximize their media investments by unlocking an important channel for ongoing performance optimization.

The performance aspect of DCO will take the spotlight in just about every piece of content you’ll read about it online. While performance is its main claim to fame, there are many less talked about benefits that DCO can offer as well.

Benefits of DCO in Advertising

DCO is a practice that offers numerous benefits to advertisers, making ads more relevant and engaging while simultaneously boosting the capacity for creative scale and creative velocity through the use of feed-driven ad content.

While an emphasis is often placed on the creative itself, some of the most valuable advantages DCO has to offer come in the form of back-office optimizations that make teams more efficient.

DCO also provides essential functions for maximizing media platform investments.

A list of some of the advantages DCO can provide beyond just a performance boost include:

• The ability to generate large volumes of creative variations through the use of dynamic feeds, reducing production time and costs while also enabling creative testing at scale.
• Increasing business process efficiency to allow teams to move creative through the production cycle more quickly.
• Being able to connect creative messaging strategies with defined target audience segments on media platforms, alleviating the need to manually traffick ads.
• Access to element-level creative data that can provide insights into how certain creative elements are impacting performance – data that is not available through media platforms.

A lot of these points may sound like vague marketing sensationalism without context to support them – so let’s take a closer look at the practical applications of DCO in more detail to illustrate what these benefits are all about.

Process Challenges

There are two main process advantages that DCO offers:

• It enables creative scale (or, in other words, it lets you produce a LOT of creative).
• It enables creative velocity (or, in other words, it enables your process to move FAST).

Where do these two advantages come from?

DCO platforms often include access to a creative studio. This serves as a centralized repository for creative files which makes it easy to find, update, and use relevant brand assets.

Rather than having files stored locally on computers, in random cloud drives, or using an ad server to retrieve creative files, the creative studio acts as a “source of truth”. This allows anyone to easily find and share the most up to date creative elements at any given time.

This approach to asset management offers several process advantages:

• Design teams can upload and share their work directly to the creative studio.
• Business teams are able to review the latest file versions to grant approval quickly.
• Media teams can review meta data relevant to each creative asset during trafficking.
• Assets within the creative studio can be converted into a dynamic feed.

While DCO is powerful, it can’t completely replace the processes that organizations use to launch campaigns. With that said, the steps involved in each process can be completed much faster by streamlining them through the structure provided by a creative studio.

More importantly is the ability to convert creative assets within the studio into a dynamic feed.

As we covered earlier, a dynamic feed allows various pre-made creative elements to be assembled into new dynamic variants on the fly.

This allows the dynamic feed stored within the creative studio to solve for scale and speed:

• Creative scale can be enabled through infinite versioning.
• Adjustments can take place instantly without needing to design from scratch or re-traffick.

To make full use of DCO and to leverage dynamic feeds to their greatest effect means adopting a modular design mindset.

Rather than designing ad units in their entirety, creative elements should be designed that can be used flexibly within multiple ads.

A modular approach to ad design offers these advantages to the creative process:

• New creative variants can be generated quickly, enabling creative scale.
• Active creative within campaigns can be easily adjusted, enabling creative velocity.
• Standardized presentations ensure that messaging is always on-brand.

From a process perspective – whether a new campaign needs to be launched, or an existing one requires an update, a modular design approach supports both creative scale and creative velocity, making production and adjustment processes take minutes instead of days.

Media Challenges

Businesses make significant investments into their media platforms. The technology doesn’t come cheap, but offers the most sophisticated ad targeting capabilities available to date.

The problem with media platforms is that most businesses use blanket-fire “one-size fits all” creative messaging that doesn’t make full use of the media capabilities they’re paying for.

Businesses end up taking this approach for a few reasons:

• Creative production isn’t able to reach scale. This means that creative variants that align with each audience segment can’t be produced, because production time and costs are too high.
• During the trafficking process, media teams aren’t able to manually keep up with coordinating creative with audience segments, because there are too many ad variations, product types, or messages.

DCO addresses both of these challenges.

By activating creative scale, teams are able to produce the volume of creative that’s needed to align with the number of audience segments their media plans include.

More importantly, DCO creates a bridge between the creative messaging strategy and the media plan. It does this by connecting directly with the media platform (aka DSP) that the business is using, and provides automated decisioning logic to match creative with audiences.

Optimization Challenges

One of the most common sources of value provided by media platforms is their ability to enable ongoing campaign optimizations over time. DSPs are great at providing detailed audience analytics, and identifying ways to increase performance through improved segment targeting.

But audience targeting is only one aspect of the optimization process. An area that’s commonly neglected during optimization is the creative itself. Like the previous challenges we’ve covered, not having scalable creative production often inhibits the ability to optimize creative messaging.

DCO enables organizations to unlock the second half of their optimization potential. This means going beyond targeting improvements to focus on optimizing the creative itself.

With the ability to produce and test unlimited variations, an entire range of new creative decisioning logic and ways to boost performance become available. By using DCO, organizations can begin optimizing creative by using these logic options:

• Campaign targeting logic. This is a “bread and butter” use-case that allows organizations to match the ideal creative message based on targeted personas, audience segments, media tactics, and other aspects of the media strategy configured on a DSP.

• Business decisioning logic. This means using metrics like product availability and physical inventory to determine which creative messaging should be served to an ad unit. It can also involve elements like geo-based rules and other logic tied to a business strategy.

• Creative optimization logic. This means having creative selections take place in alignment with prioritized dimensions that have been defined. These dimensions can include:

• Creative elements. This can include elements that align with defined audience interests, product features, promotional content, or an emphasis on certain imagery. When this logic is applied, creative is selected based on the prioritized elements.

• Creative performance. This means selecting creative elements in the pursuit of increasing common KPIs like clickthrough rates, cost per action, conversions, and more. When this logic is applied, creative is selected based on the prioritized metrics.

In order to get the most out of all of these new channels of optimization, advertisers also need access to creative insights that are offered exclusively by DCO technology.

Insight Challenges

It almost goes without saying, but with the ability to produce and test unlimited creative variations, advertisers need a way to be able to measure the results of each variant.

What *is* worth mentioning is that creative-level insights are a reporting element that isn’t available within media platforms. While DSPs excel at providing ad-level audience data, they aren’t designed to provide details about how creative variants are influencing performance.

The great thing about DCO is that it provides creative-level data for advertisers to review. This means that adjustments to creative messaging and visual presentation can be monitored for a quantifiable impact on performance.

This information isn’t just great for large scale campaigns – even organizations that are running very basic advertising initiatives may find that they can substantially improve ROI by testing a few creative variations mixed into their current initiatives.

There are many practical applications for creative insight data, some of which may include:

• Gaining a better understanding of which product features drive the most action.
• Learning which messaging and visuals resonate most with each audience.
• Seeing which parts of animated and interactive creative elements are the most engaging.
• Quantifying improvements that are made to the presentation and visual design of creative.
• Finding out which creative is underperforming to make revisions.

In essence, creative insights eliminate guesswork and major reporting blind spots which are present in every modern media platform today.

While some aspects of marketing and advertising sometimes include complicated API calls and data scraping practices, the best part about creative insights when using a platform like Advanse is that they’re included and easily accessible from any reporting interface of choice.

What is a DCO platform?

A DCO platform is a piece of creative technology that provides the necessary infrastructure to enable creative scale, process velocity, and media synchronization. It combines all of the performance benefits of DCO with tools that make process optimization just as accessible.

There are many DCO platforms that can provide you with these capabilities. However, a lack of transparent pricing and time-consuming learning curves often come as part of the bundle. This friction causes many advertisers to never give DCO a try, or to give up after having a bad experience with a single vendor.

When selecting a DCO platform, it’s worthwhile to consider more than just the technical capabilities that the vendor provides.

For instance, a service like Advanse is more than just a DCO platform. By working with a team of experts, you’re activating a complete dynamic creative system that combines…

• People (a team of professionals with decades of experience in ad tech)
• Process (enable creative velocity to make your turnaround times faster than ever)
• Technology (enable creative scale, connect it to your media plan, and get creative insights)

Challenges of DCO Solved by Advanse

Advertising used to be a lot simpler than it is today – which is strange to think about when you consider that ad tech was originally created to make everything simple. What happened??

As the long history of programmatic advertising has unfolded over the years, the “unification” that was promised by ad networks has been replaced with intense fragmentation and specialized service providers – some of which specialize in solving the fragmentation itself!

Like any industry, competition surrounding each “iceberg” in the ad tech ocean has grown year over year. With so much venture-backed capital pouring into the sector, the price of tech in the advertising space has skyrocketed to prohibitively expensive levels.

Remember that good old call to action – “Get a Free Demo”? The cost of operating for many solutions has climbed so high that you can’t even see what a product is supposed to do without hitting a paywall to see what it’s capable of in the first place.

The same problem has plagued the creative tech space for many years, with enterprise grade solutions charging for expensive tech decks and custom demo builds, paired with lengthy, multi-year contracts that present a significant vendor lock-in situation *(just perfect for a sector that sees more year over year changes to policy and technology than almost any other, right?)*.

Advanse offers an alternative to the modern madness of ad tech. Finally, something is simple – just like it was supposed to be all of those years ago.

Advanse’s DCO system provides everything an advertiser could want in a creative studio: a centralized place for all creative needs to be met quickly, with the ability to make adjustments and adaptations whenever they’re needed – without having to start from scratch.

If you’re working with a managed DCO provider like Advanse, all of the work gets taken out of the creative process – letting you put your best ideas into action without effort. Not only that, but simple SaaS pricing makes it easy to give DCO a try without risk or high commitment.

Call it old school, but Advanse even offers free demos if you’re interested!

Examples of Dynamic Creative Optimization

As mentioned earlier, examples of dynamic creative can sometimes confuse people about what it’s actually all about, and what its true value is.

Some of the most common examples of DCO often involve showcasing its ability to adjust messaging and visuals based on the conditions the ad is being served in.

For instance, in this example, Burger King adjusts their creative by updating their messaging and featured product imagery based on the current time of day.

This can cause many to come to the conclusion that DCO is just another term for contextual advertising, when in reality, this is a very limited scope of what the technology is actually capable of.

Another very common dynamic creative example is showing off time and weather based advertisements, which are especially prominent in DOOH advertising.

This can again cause confusion – is dynamic creative just a mix of geo-targeting and contextual signals? While those factors can play a role in DCO, they’re only one component of the broader range of its capabilities. There are many more applications for the technology.

To illustrate how dynamic elements can be used to adjust creative, this set of display ads draw from a dynamic creative feed in order to showcase different travel destinations to viewers.

In another example, this ad unit is designed to dynamically populate the dealership locations for RVs based on the nearest options, based on a viewer’s location.

Another, often less talked about application for dynamic creative is its ability to quickly rotate promotions, or to feature multiple offers within a single ad unit. In this example for instance, multiple offers are showcased to avoid having to pick and choose which one to display.

Another technique to leverage DCO in a way similar to the example above is to add offers to upper-funnel brand awareness campaigns that increase conversions, or conversely to add brand awareness or personalized lifestyle messaging to lower-funnel direct buy campaigns.

In this way, advertisers are able to get twice the value out of their creative. By enabling versatile messaging techniques, advertisers that use DCO no longer need to choose between emphasizing their offers or brand awareness – they can get both in a single message.

This is also enabled in part by new creative capabilities that DCO can provide. In many of the examples above, you’ll notice that the creative is animated. This gives advertisers more room to include all of their key value statements without having to compromise any part of the message.

Activating DCO Without Friction

Many organizations are interested in giving DCO a try, but have trouble finding a way to activate it that doesn’t include a high-risk, high-commitment contract to access the technology.

Similarly, many advertisers make the investment into DCO technology, only to end up having a bad experience that causes them to never try it again based on their initial results.

Advanse has been designed and refined from the ground up to make it as simple and as risk free as possible to give dynamic creative a try.

There are no yearly contracts to commit to. Simple SaaS pricing lets you activate on a month-to-month plan, meaning that if you’re not getting value out of the platform, you can cancel whenever you want to.

You can make all of the headaches that come with the creative process disappear as well. Our team of experts are ready to make your creative strategy a reality in just days, and to make any post-launch adjustments whenever you need them.

Unlike many enterprise solutions on the market, at Advanse, we’re ready to show you exactly what the platform is capable of without hiding it behind a paywall.

So whenever you’re ready – we’d be happy to share a conversation!