As we introduced on Wednesday and explained further yesterday, it’s critical to pair your media buying strategies with smart creative strategies to develop more successful digital campaigns. A media buy is only as good as the creative that goes into it! 

Our second creative and media pairing revolves around the idea of programmatic: When you are buying your media programmatically (automatically, in real-time, with granular information about each viewer) you should also be building your creative messages automatically, in real time, for every viewer. Dynamic creative is a technique that advertisers can use to accomplish these real-time messages.

Did you know? Consumers are twice as likely to engage with real-time advertising than they are with generic ads.* 

Dynamic creative is a powerful and flexible system that lets marketers create a single ad template and then swap in creative variations to fit each viewer. What's more, it does it in real time: changing headlines, images, copy and calls to action depending on variables like the user's demographic, their location and the device they're using at the moment they see the ad. 

People may be familiar with the idea of dynamic creative for direct response campaigns (i.e. showing a product based on what someone already viewed), but there are also clever ways to incorporate dynamic creative for brand awareness campaigns. 

For example, Nike used dynamic creative to fuel their real-time “Phenomenal Shot” campaign for the World Cup. Nike wanted to deliver experiences that related to live moments in the soccer matches. They used an HTML5 dynamic template, which allowed them to create and manage one flexible ad—instead of hundreds of custom-built ads—that could run across screens. 

To accommodate dozens of ad alternatives localized for 15 different languages, they created a Google Spreadsheet template that served as their dynamic feed to generate ads. Once the dynamic feed was set up, they could generate the ads quickly by updating the spreadsheet, which minimized the effort and speed of releasing ads in real time. The spreadsheet was robust yet simple enough that the ads could be updated without assistance from technical or creative employees.


Nike cleverly used dynamic creative as a way to bring live moments into their ad campaigns in real-time. Knowing that their viewers were on their phones as they were watching the soccer matches, Nike made sure their ads could show up on smartphones and tablets, to grab users’ attention and engagement during commercials or breaks in the game. 

As brands buy more reservation-based ads through programmatic channels, using the information about their audiences in their creative is going to become increasingly important. To accomplish these smart creative campaigns, Advertisers must include both the media agency and the creative agency in the room at the outset of the campaign. This will enable the agencies to develop creative and media plans that are aligned. 

To learn more about how to pair dynamic creative with your programmatic media buy, visit our dynamic solutions page and select the vertical that is relevant for you. 

And come back on Monday for our third pairing: Mobile media buys and HTML5 creative. 

 Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

*source: “Media Economy Report: How Data is Changing our Business,” Jan. 2014, Magna Global