In an ideal world of online advertising, the right message would reach the right person at the perfect time. In reality, however, this is not a simple task since filtering through millions of viewers to make the best match, while also factoring in their previous responses, is like finding a moving needle in a haystack. In addition to serving the most relevant ad, the ads need to be served the right number oftimes to ensure the ad is un-intrusive. This article uses two case studies from ad serving firm MediaMind to show how Dynamic Creative Optimization has recently evolved.
The online travel industry is brutally competitive, with travel agencies, affiliates, wholesalers and travel products companies fighting for top position. Targeting viewers from the other end of the world requires understanding the buying patterns of thousands of different target customers and then customizing the ad creative and media buy accordingly.
TourSpain succeeded in attracting potential visitors from all over the world by tailoring ads to match demographics, location and the preferred language.
The campaign began with the production of four TV commercials (targeting youth, seniors, families, and Asian audiences), which were broadcast in each of the different countries. TourSpain then brought the campaign online by developing one master ad to create localized versions in 28 markets across 12 languages. Using dynamic creative optimization, the one master ad quickly generated 448 versions in 15 formats, which allowed for updates in real-time to meet the specifications of over 220 foreign media publishers. The campaign resulted in over 1.6 million visits to the TourSpain website.
Tourism Australia brought the concept of targeting ads one step further by adding creative optimization, which analyzes users’ feedback and then displays the creative that is more likely to receive clicks and conversions.
Alhthough, sophisticated creative optimization is still a new and unfamiliar territory that advertisers and agencies alike don’t always know how to handle, Tourism Australia succeeded in harnessing the power of dynamic creative optimization to generate a real success story.
Tourism Australia’s objectives were to engage New Zealanders online, sharing with them Australians’ favorite experiences. The global campaign ‘There’s nothing like Australia’ encouraged Australians to share their favorite Australian place with the world. Kiwi’s were then invited to visit nothinglikeaustralia.com to immerse themselves in over 29,000 unique experiences.
Instead of running all creatives evenly distributed, Tourism Australia utilized Dynamic Creative Optimization from MediaMind’s Smart Versioning to identify and then to serve the most appealing ad the majority of times in order to encourage a high level of response.
The optimized placement achieved a CTR of 0.82% while a similar non-optimized placement in terms of creative, publisher and size, recorded a CTR of 0.15% for an improvement of 447%.
These campaigns had impressive results because they took into account the following basic principles:
• Get intimate with your target audiences – Research different target audiences and their preferences. These preferences can bee translated into many different offers and messages.
• Follow your audience through the funnel – Different messages should be created for each step of the decision making process, defining promotions that will drive a conversion or will take the audience to the next step.
• Keep it fresh – Messages and promotions should be kept fresh and responded to in real time to ongoing events.
• Integration with ad servers – By integrating ad versioning and creative optimization into the ad servers, agencies and advertisers benefit from seamless operation and comprehensive reporting.
With experience, managing sophisticated on-line campaigns with thousands of versions will become a science. Over time, agencies and advertisers will incorporate this new skill set in-house until the process of planning and executing a campaign with dynamic creative optimization will become common place. In the travel market, where there are more global campaigns requiring localization, this will result in more precise targeting and a higher response rate.
This can be a welcome development for those of us who are struggling to decide where to spend our summer vacation.
www.mediamind.com
