Dynamic creative: the power of personalised messaging

It’s likely you have viewed online banner adverts that use dynamic creative, but not known what it’s called, or how the company’s messages seem so relevant to you. Let’s take a look at what dynamic creative is, how it’s built and how it serves you the right message at the right point in time.

What is dynamic creative?

Dynamic creative messaging allows an advertisement to update its creative message in real-time depending on a number of predefined rules – this ensures that instead of broad audiences being exposed to the same message, a banner can be updated to speak to a user in a more personalised way.

The examples of dynamic banners are endless, with advertisers having the opportunity to be very creative in how they choose to approach these. An airline may display region-specific airfares from your location, a bank could display the most recent market mortgage rates or a supermarket could display items you usually buy on special at your nearest store.

As with any advertisement, a brand’s goal is to serve you an engaging message and encourage you to click. By including a dynamic element as part of this, the brand is able to provide you more relevant messages instantaneously.

How are they built?

Dynamic banners are unique in that they see a perfect marriage between creative and technology.

A creative team will design a template for the asset, defining the overall look and feel of the banners. Considerations need to be made here for where the dynamic piece will fit – whether it’s a change in text, colour or image. Designers need to ensure that their template will work with all iterations of a dynamic piece – for example a banner advertising travel destinations for sale would need to allow for enough room to fit the destinations “Asia” to “Zimbabwe”.

From the technology side, an integration needs to be made to link up the creative element with the dataset – that is, when the banner displays, it needs to have a source of truth from where to fetch the dynamic content. For example – the dynamic banner will need to know where you are located and where your ideal holiday destination is, to serve you the ad.

These banners are then loaded into an Ad Server where information is collated and is then able to be served to uses on a variety of devices and websites.

Recently at realestate.co.nz we ran a campaign featuring dynamic creative – in this example we had three dynamic elements. The number, the type of property and the city was pulling from our website in real-time and was updated in the advert. For a user to be served the below advert, they would have searched for homes in Lower Hutt City.

How do they target us?

While it may seem like magic at times, the methodology behind this targeting is quite straight-forward. When you browse online, your behaviour is being captured – this isn’t analysed against you as an individual, but rather puts you in a large group of people who had similar behaviours online.

Some of the most common methods used to target users include:

• Geo location: These banners target you based on your IP address, providing an indication to the ad server of where you are located in the country
• Device category: This takes into account the device you’re accessing a website from – whether that’s desktop, mobile or tablet
• Demographics: Based on your browsing patterns, advertisers can group users into inferred age and gender segments 

With this technology becoming increasingly used by companies, it’s important to know what data you are giving away and how it can be used. Remember that providing data isn’t necessarily a negative thing - it means you will get more personalised and relevant advertising messaging. As you’re part of much bigger picture of users, it also means that content well received by people similar to you, will be served to you also – exposing you to a tight range of messaging that is relevant and useful.

realestate.co.nz is serious about protecting your privacy and serving messages which are relevant to you – if you would like more information about our privacy policy and options to opt out of receiving certain advertisements please visit our privacy page https://www.realestate.co.nz/website-terms-and-conditions