Dynamic Creative and Digital Storytelling

Programmatic technology has offered advertisers unparalleled ability to integrate data into their media buying, unlocking new possibilities in audience identification, segmentation and targeting. It also allows for those targeted segments to receive dynamically chosen creative for more effective personalization.

• How common is the use of dynamic creative in digital campaigns? It depends on what’s considered “true” dynamic creative. Retargeting, which could be considered one of the earliest types of dynamic creative, has wide currency among digital advertisers, especially retailers. Multivariate testing is also common. But some practitioners may have newer, more sophisticated types of dynamic creative optimization in mind when they use the term.
• How are advertisers executing campaigns with dynamic creative? Advertisers and agencies typically work with ad tech partners to generate and serve dynamically optimized creative, as part of their programmatic stack. Two in five marketers surveyed in May 2018 by Econsultancy and MediaMath said they were using artificial intelligence (AI) to power their dynamic creative. This was closely in line with the share using AI for two other key steps in the process: audience targeting and segmentation.
• How are marketers using dynamic creative optimization to reach and engage consumers? Multivariate testing can now be done across hundreds of creative variants thanks to AI, helping marketers find the right color, font, call to action and background image to reach a particular consumer. Retargeted ads can display not just the same product a consumer shopped for the day before, but also the angle that might be most appealing to that shopper.
• What challenges are still associated with dynamic creative optimization? Theoretically, just about any marketer should have most of the pieces required to build dynamic creative ads, because just about any marketer is likely to be using those pieces to create ads on Facebook. But in many cases, organizational silos have meant that the teams working on programmatic display ads don’t have access to the same materials.

WHAT’S IN THIS REPORT? This report explores current trends in dynamic creative, including multivariate testing and optimization, retargeting and other forms of personalization, including sequencing.

KEY STAT: More than two in five advertisers surveyed by Econsultancy and MediaMath worldwide in May 2018 said they were already using AI to power dynamic creative.