What Brands Need to Understand Before They Execute Dynamic Creative Optimization

It’s difficult to do because it requires integration between your website data and your media data, which may live in silos. You may also have third-party data that you buy from companies like Experian or Acxiom, as well as your CRM [customer relationship management] data, which may come from call centers, website activity and so on.

Marketers love the idea of delivering more engaging, smart and relevant messaging, but they're not able to deliver on the idea just yet, especially larger brands. But regardless of size, some brands are agile and understand that it takes several months to define a data strategy. Others don't understand that it isn't just a switch you can flip.

Providers like Google are only recently creating technology that allows us to embrace the different aspects of creative. But now you have situations where users' data is being better protected—like with the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] and UserID now missing from DoubleClick. It's harder to identify users across devices. My whole data strategy goes to hell unless I work with vendors that have that cross-device user ID.

There’s an ethical question. It's easy to piggyback on someone else’s machine learning algorithm. You don’t have to be a world-class data scientist to use machine learning—you just have to know how to apply the technologies to your tech stack. If that’s what’ll happen—and it will definitely happen—how do we ensure that marketers don’t forget about the humans they’re talking to? In an age of automation, how do we maintain our humanity?