FEATURE SPOTLIGHT | CREATIVE AUTHORING WITH AD BUILDER
Baking Success Into DCO: How to Avoid Getting Burned by Creative Production Complexities
By: Jessica Hondolero, VP Creative Solutions & Kendal Dennis, VP Creative Operations
Imagine you’re tasked with making 1000 cookies for a bake sale, crafting different recipes to appeal to various tastes. After painstakingly packaging all 1000 cookies, you realize they were supposed to go in boxes, not bags. The frustration of starting over is all too familiar to creative production designers.
82% of agencies revealed they still manually create unique ads for different campaigns
As the digital landscape evolves, so does the customer journey. Consumers are becoming more cognizant of targeting strategies and expect better, more personalized ad experiences. Because of that, even the simplest campaigns now require data and DCO to scale messaging effectively across channels and platforms.
In a recent report conducted by Digiday and Clinch, 82% of agencies revealed they still manually create unique ads for different campaigns and only 12% stated a high degree of collaboration between their creative, data analytics and ad serving teams. These staggering statistics highlight the inefficiencies in current DCO workflows.
Relying on manual, error-prone processes is no longer sustainable in this fast-paced environment, and there must be a more unified strategic approach to DCO that meets these growing demands.
Fragmented Strategies & Inefficient Workflows
Creative production designers face a multitude of challenges, with one of the biggest being alignment between creative and media strategies. This is crucial not only for personalization, but also for accurate campaign measurement. While dynamic elements in templates enable the creative to be personalized, they also determine the granularity level of reporting. If the media team expects to gain audience-specific insights from their campaign’s reporting, it’s imperative they remain in sync with the designers from the start of the creative production process.
As designers move through production, they often face last-minute changes and legal updates at scale. Designing for multi-channel launches while having to adhere to brand guidelines across formats just adds extra levels of complexity. What’s more, legacy tools have a tendency to silo stakeholders and delay feedback, forcing teams to sift through thousands of separate preview links. This reliance on emails and spreadsheets for feedback creates inefficient workflows, leading to communication breakdowns, burnout and reluctance to pursue personalized messaging strategies.
Ultimately, these challenges often result in tedious rework, further delays, and can even erode creative relevancy.
Breaking Down Silos & Enhancing Collaborations
Managing feedback throughout the creative production process can prove to be a challenge when involving various stakeholders. To overcome these silos, Ad Builder’s enhanced review and feedback features promote visibility, transparency and collaboration within the UI. Stakeholders can view externally shareable preview links, comment, or “@mention” collaborators, ensuring that all feedback is centralized and efficiently addressed.
Additionally, Ad Builder’s creative template tearsheets allow users to preview a template’s appearance and functionality, providing visibility into every creative variation across all ad sizes when connected to a feed. This level of heightened transparency and thoroughness, helps ensure a more seamless and effective execution of DCO campaigns.
Unique Automated Creative Authoring Features in Flight Control
Auto-generate & Map Dynamic Parameters
Configure & Optimize Creative Assets
Auto-fill & Resize Images w/ AI-powered Outpaint Feature
QA Creative Template Appearance & Functionality
Conclusion
While tools like Flight Control’s Ad Builder provide powerful automation and collaboration features, working with the right partners and tools is only half the battle. A truly successful DCO campaign requires a cohesive integration of strategy across creative, media, and analytics teams from the start. Much like making 1000 cookies for a bake sale, only to discover they were packaged incorrectly, misalignment across these teams can lead to inefficiencies, delays, and costly rework.
A cohesive strategy can be attained by identifying internal DCO champions and subject matter experts who can advocate for designing flexible, multi-use case ad templates. Engaging with the right DCO partners early in the process can also provide essential guidance and best practices. This not only saves time and resources on the backend, but also ensures that creatives are scalable and adaptable. In the end, fostering alignment and leveraging the right tools and expertise can streamline the DCO process, optimize performance, and ultimately meet the growing demands of data-driven advertising.
To learn more, contact info@clinch.co
About Clinch
Clinch is the recognized leader in omnichannel ad serving. The company’s AI-driven dynamic personalization technology delivers custom-tailored ad experiences across all channels, driving best-in-class performance and ROI. Flight Control, Clinch’s Omnichannel Campaign Activation Platform, enables agencies and brands to manage the entire campaign lifecycle, from strategy through activation and measurement, on a single platform that makes them massively more productive, efficient, and profitable. In everything Clinch does, it automates workflows and leverages data to personalize and optimize display and video ad experiences at scale, across programmatic, CTV, social media, in-app, audio, and Digital Out of Home (DOOH). For more information visit: www.clinch.co
