“Despite programmatic tech adoption, this world of three-letter acronyms is as foreign to some digital marketers as reading a medical journal.”
That’s an excerpt from an article by James Hercher on AdExchanger.
As ad tech continues to grow and fragment each year, so too does the list of jargon that you need to wrap your head around.
So, we’re going to make at least one of these three latter acronyms a little easier to understand. That acronym is DCO – dynamic creative optimization.
The easiest way to understand “DCO” is to drop the “O”.
Without the “O”, what is dynamic creative?
Dynamic creative is ad creative that is powered by data feeds.
And what problem does this technology solve? Scale.
Scale problems during creative production can arise from many factors, including a large number of locations, products, testing variants, or audience personalization.
It’s that last use-case in the list, audience personalization, that really gave rise to the term DCO. The goal was (and still is) to optimize a message using context (like time of day, weather, geo-location, etc.) to deliver the most relevant ad possible.
But in order to reach all of those different audiences, a large number of message variants were (and still are) required. And, fundamentally, this volume of message variants is a problem of scale.
By framing the personalization problem as a creative scale challenge, you start to unlock more opportunities for dynamic creative to drive value for your advertising process.
DCO causes advertisers to frame their understanding of this creative technology predominately around a media performance use-case. This causes them to miss out on all of the other production benefits that dynamic creative has to offer.
Any advertiser that has a creative scale challenge can benefit from dynamic creative.
In this post, we’ll be breaking down each component of DCO.
By the end, you’ll have a foundational understanding of dynamic creative – along with its logistical and strategic benefits which are often overshadowed by the industry’s focus on performance.
What is DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization)?
Dynamic creative optimization is a programmatic advertising technique that optimizes media performance by leveraging creative automation to match personalized ad content to intended audiences in real-time.
As described in the introduction, DCO is the most popular application of creative technology. It is frequently used in discussions surrounding media optimization.
Media optimization often involves techniques such as:
- Programmatic Bidding
- Programmatic Targeting
- Audience Segmentation
- Data-Driven Decisioning
- A/B and Multivariate Testing
- Frequency Capping
- and many more…
An Industry Focused On Performance
When talking about DCO, performance is almost always the main focus. Take a look at these two descriptions from two of the biggest players in the space – Amazon and Meta:
“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
You’ll notice that both of these definitions make a mention of programmatic advertising and ad performance – terminology from the media side of the ecosystem.
While these definitions aren’t incorrect, they are incomplete. They focus so heavily on the media side of the definition that the production side of dynamic creative is lost in translation.
How DCO Connects Creative Messaging with Media Targeting
The platforms that provide media capabilities to advertisers are referred to as DSPs. DSPs are media buying platforms which are designed to help advertisers optimize their campaigns.
However, DSPs do not natively offer DCO to advertisers. DCO is powered by creative technology which is offered separately from the media capabilities that DSPs provide – often as part of an ad server that comes bundled with the DSP.
Once they have access to creative management tools, advertisers can implement DCO.
DCO connects an advertiser’s creative messaging strategy to their media targeting strategy.
The primary benefit of making this connection is an increase to performance by making ads more relevant to recipients through personalisation.
Since its introduction, this performance advantage offered by DCO has been so desirable that the creative technology that powers it has ended up positioned and sold primarily as a media optimization tool. This eventually led to creative automation’s benefits – including cost savings and process efficiency, being left out of the conversation entirely.
What is dynamic creative? – The Creative Production Advantage
Dynamic creative refers to the practice of leveraging data and automation to assemble parts of an advertisement in real-time as part of delivering a personalized message.
Creative technology comes with a wide range of advantages that offer immense business value to adopters. Described briefly, creative tech offers efficiency.
While relevance is important for optimizing media, process efficiency makes it possible to do more with less. Dynamic creative allows teams with tight budgets, strict deadlines, and limited business resources to accomplish significantly more than they could otherwise.
How is creative done today?
Today, most advertisers use static creative practices to deliver their ads.
Static creative is similar to the way print ads have worked in magazines and newspapers for decades. A workflow process is used to assemble various creative components – bringing copy, images, designs, and colors together to form a single print ad that is used as an ad placement.
While that single ad can be copied and distributed throughout thousands of copies of the same print publication, it is “static” creative. If an advertiser wanted to change any part of the creative, they would need to go back to the start of their workflow and update the ad manually.
Now take the concept of static creative and apply it to modern digital advertising.
Advertisers are stuck using creative practices from the 90s.
You might think to yourself, “we’ve certainly come a long way since print ads”… but in reality, a majority of advertisers still use static creative workflows to power their digital campaigns.
This means that every time even the smallest change needs to be made to the creative, the advertiser needs to redo the entire creative unit to make an adjustment.
Not only does that mean that changing a single word or color can take days or weeks, but it can also mean that advertisers are forced to commit to a limited number of pre-determined messaging strategies prior to launching their campaigns.
Advertisers are limited in how many of their ideas they can pursue, and must wait for a long time for campaigns to run their course to figure out what messages are working – presenting a combination of pre-launch and post-launch challenges to contend with.
Enter dynamic creative – a modern creative process for modern media strategies.
Dynamic creative is a complete departure from static creative. It allows advertisers to replace “one-size fits all” messaging tactics with personalized and relevant creative messaging.
Media strategies often use highly sophisticated audience targeting. Sending the same message to every recipient does not make full use of these expensive programmatic capabilities.
By using ideal creative that aligns with media targeting, businesses are able to maximize their media investments by delivering the most effective messages to optimize every impression.
… that is, of course, the most popular and most talked about application of the technology.
But think about all of the other applications of dynamic vs static creative. With creative automation, in addition to optimizing every impression, teams are able to:
- Make unlimited versioning a reality
- Pursue all of the best ideas without limits
- Build a library of reusable creative assets
- Apply advanced types of decisioning logic
- Make adjustments on-the-fly without starting from scratch
Dynamic creative is an essential part of unlocking the creative freedom teams need to overcome their most difficult challenges. Even when faced with tight budgets and limited resources, dynamic creative enables teams to keep up with constant creative demands.
So what exactly is the technology that powers all of these advantages behind the scenes? This is where dynamic feeds come into play.
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 an ad template during the ad serving process.
Dynamic feeds (also known as content feeds) are 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.
The feed makes 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.
As an analogy, a dynamic feed acts as the storage warehouse for all of a brand’s creative assets. Whenever an ad call is made, the feed is where the ad components are retrieved from based on the various rules included in a decision engine.
The decisioning engine drives creative automation.
A decisioning engine is a system that is designed to automate and streamline all of the different factors that go into determining which creative components should be included in an ad.
As part of conducting its role, the decision engine stores a detailed set of logic-based rules for the ad serving process to follow. Common types of decisioning logic can include campaign targeting, business rules, and creative optimization.
For example, an advertiser that is running a promotion for a specific product might configure their decision engine to always select images of that product when an ad associated with the campaign is being served. If a certain color scheme is associated with the campaign, those colors might also always be included for elements like the background, callouts, and buttons.
Once a specified end date is reached, the decision engine can automatically revert back to “evergreen” creative to continue fulfilling ad calls. As an example of business logic, a retailer that runs out of inventory at a store location could also use that as a signal to end the campaign.
Content feeds and decision engines are essential to creative automation. The last component of a dynamic creative is a simple way to apply these tools to common ad formats and layouts. Sounds a lot like a template, doesn’t it?
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 to deliver personalized messaging when an ad is served.
When loaded with branded assets from a content feed, dynamic templates are an essential part of automating versioning work out of a creative workflow.
Templates can be thought of like a blueprint or a floor plan with markers on it to indicate where certain creative 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.
To complete our analogy from earlier, dynamic feeds are like a creative storage warehouse that houses all of a brand’s assets. The decision engine is the “brain” that coordinates the ad serving process, and templates act as the “floor plan” for each different type of ad unit.
These tools come together to form dynamic creative – the bridge that powers connected creative and media strategies. This allows advertisers to “transport” massive volumes of personalized creative in an organized way into their media platforms to enable a connection between their creative strategy and their media targeting plan.
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.
Templates make it simple.
Similar to how many businesses are still using creative workflows from the 90s, advertisers commonly find themselves stuck using static creative in their campaigns due to limitations.
Templates enable advertisers to easily take the most popular ad formats and enhance them for even greater impact throughout their campaigns.
Creative elements can be animated to draw even more attention to ads through eye-catching motion. Animations also allow advertisers to cycle through multiple text and image combinations, giving them an extended messaging canvas to work with.
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.
With a dedicated content feed ensuring creative is always-on-brand feed, templates make it easy for advertisers to access all of the best advantages of DCO without the complexity.
Activating DCO Without Friction
One of the biggest challenges that creative teams face is messaging scale. There are always new creative demands being made along with a constant stream of revision requests.
Dynamic creative provides the fundamental infrastructure needed to deliver any number of personalized messaging variants – overcoming the scale bottleneck. When loaded with branded assets, dynamic templates automate all of the tedious versioning work out of the equation.
Many advertisers are interested in giving DCO a try, but have trouble finding a way to activate it.
Advanse provides a simple, low-commitment way to give DCO a try.
