Staying ahead of the advertising curve means leveraging the latest technologies to deliver personalised, engaging, and effective experiences—a concept that just about birthed Dynamic Content Optimisation (DCO) around ten years ago.
This technology once revolutionsed the advertising landscape, becoming commonplace for many brands and agencies working in adland. But, what exactly is DCO and how does it work?
Let’s start with the basics.
What is Dynamic Creative Optimisation?
DCO creates versioned assets in real-time based on user data by analysing various user behaviours and preferences. The technology dynamically assembles ad components to deliver a highly personalised and relevant experience for each individual user.
The technology is the logical continuation of A/B testing, except that more versions can be tested, and the learnings can be both instantly and automatically implemented to ensure that assets in the public domain are as effective as they can be.
The process starts by creating several variations of an ad, and puts them live. It then gauges the performance metrics of each asset and identifies which is performing best. The software consequently prioritises serving the highest performing version of the asset, and eliminates less effective counterparts.
This is sometimes considered as inefficient, both in terms of the effort to create the “wasted” versions and in terms of the media budget spent on suboptimal versions while the model worked out the best one.
How does the technology work?
The real power of DCO lies in its ability to generate multiple versions of an advertisement and quickly analyse the performance. It’s basically real-time A/B testing for advertisements, with added optimisation.
Here is what it might look like in practice:
Creation of ad versions
The software creates multiple variations of an ad, each with different elements such as images, text, and calls to action.
Performance analysis
Variations of the ad are then displayed to different segments of the audience, and the algorithms continuously monitor how each version performs against the selected demographic.
Real-time optimisation
Based on performance data, the technology prioritises and serves the best-performing ad versions to the most relevant audience segments, ensuring that viewers see the ads that are most likely to resonate with them.
Does the process require the use of cookies?
DCO typically relies on cookies to gather user data. Cookies help track user behaviour and preferences, enabling the technology to personalise ads more effectively. By understanding what users have previously interacted with, DCO can tailor ads to better meet their interests.
How does optimisation work?
DCO ads are dynamic by nature, meaning they are put together and personalised almost immediately. This real-time customisation ensures that each ad is contextually relevant to the user, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Benefits of Creative Optimisation
The benefits of creative optimisation are more than impactful:
- Increased engagement: personalised ads are more likely to capture user attention and drive interaction.
- Higher conversion rates: by serving relevant ads, users are more inclined to take desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service.
- Cost efficiency: optimising ad performance helps maximise return on investment (ROI) by reducing wasted ad spend.
- Better insights: continuous data analysis provides valuable insights that can inform future campaigns and creative strategies
Are there any alternatives to DCO?
While traditional DCO focuses on real-time ad assembly and performance optimisation, newer approaches like SmartAssets take this a step further. SmartAssets AI-enabled technology provides more in-depth insights, evaluates creative assets before they go live, automates creative changes, and uses image recognition to tag ad components at a granular level.
This process helps creatives to understand not just which assets perform better, but also why.
The advantage that gen-AI creative optimisation has over traditional DCO is that it is not limited to templated models, meaning that the variations are creatively limitless.
How does SmartAssets differentiate from DCO?
SmartAssets represents the next evolutionary step beyond traditional Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) by leveraging generative AI to significantly enhance creative effectiveness testing.
While DCO creates multiple ad versions and prioritises the best-performing ones based on real-time data, it lacks the capability to understand and incorporate historical data and creative component insights.
SmartAssets, on the other hand, uses advanced AI to tag and analyse creative components at a granular level, offering deeper insights into what specific elements drive engagement. This approach not only looks at current performance but also utilises historical data to make informed predictions about future ad effectiveness.
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