DCO: Creative That Contours to Consumers

The days of trying fit a round peg into a square hole are over. Yet, not too long ago advertisers were marooned into pushing one-size-fits-all creative and hoping that mass appeal messages resonated with the entirety of their audience.

Now, advertisers have seemingly infinite options when it comes to pinpointing audiences and tailoring their messages in real-time to captivate and convert consumers. With dynamic creative optimization, or DCO, marketers can leverage browsing data, changing market conditions, and real-time data feeds to orchestrate highly relevant personalized ads.

But how?                                                                                    

The most common way DCO is currently implemented is through “dynamic retargeting”—the advertiser detects initial interest from the user and then reintroduces the product or service again and again over time. Typically, dynamic retargeting comes in the form of an increased offer to propel conversions, for example, a coupon or supplemental deal such as free shipping on that Panini press you added to your cart but never purchased, or a free session of that yoga class you had been looking into.

Aside from additional offers, dynamic retargeting is leveraged to tell more of a brand or products story with customized carousels, which have the visual capacity to showcase entire product lines. Also, the creative assets displayed are personalized based on a user’s known profile—all housed within the space that would normally contain a single image.

You might be thinking – so what could go wrong? Unfortunately as opportunities to deliver more personalized messages increase, so can the risk of delivering the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time – something that was not as problematic in the era of mass messaging. At MBuy, we utilize more than one data source for our targeting to ensure we are accurately delivering the right messages. By leveraging multiple variables, we can generate more specific audience pools and, in turn, can pinpoint the right users with a higher degree of accuracy.

User behavior is an important data point but we also leverage DCO to capitalize on changing conditions like the weather to drive delivery sales for an online delivery service. Research found that people had a higher propensity to order delivery when the weather was bad— thus, we viewed this as an opportune time to put more ads in front of consumers. Additionally, we utilize geo-targeting as a base, then link a weather API to the ads increasing serving during adverse weather conditions.

In addition to combining user actions and changing conditions, DCO also encompasses A/B testing so that we can see which of our outreach efforts are most effective— optimizing and prioritizing the best performing variations of the ad to serve more. Previously, advertisers would have to wait for data to pool in on all ad variants and then manually optimize towards the best performing ad—resulting in wasted ad spend and possibly missing out on consumers who could have been delivered a more effective message.

While most advanced marketing teams have heard of these practices we, find that many do not implement advanced DCO - especially across channels. At MBuy, cross-channel is our specialty, so feel free to check out more of our stories here, and take your targeting to the next level.

Benjamin Badofsky

Trafficking Corrdinator, MBuy