Creative optimization series part two: Design trends and tips

In this four-part series on creative optimization, we’ll examine some of the trends, tips, and strategies that help marketers get performative creative assets.

Creative optimization series part two: Design trends and tips

Insights into which creative elements successfully engage a brand’s audiences are becoming increasingly important for designers. We are seeing the relationship between design and data become stronger as designers are relying more and more on data to inform their ad creatives.

In a piece on Forbes by Julie Bernard, the CMO of Verve, she weighed in on the role of data in digital marketing today. She states, “IT budgets will shift to marketing as advertiser CMOs protect media spend.” When marketers collaborate with IT to create data-driven designs for their ad campaigns, the results are impressive. As predicted, we’re seeing much more of this trend in advertising.

Dynamic creatives get dynamite results

Dynamic ads are an effective way for a brand to insert personalization into their ad strategy. Such ads are built in real time by pulling together creative elements based on the user, their location, device type, and various other relevant factors. A great example of effective dynamic ad use is Waze. Through a partnership with their parent company, Google, Waze put out a set of ten different ad creatives to serve ten different cities. Through dynamic updates using real-time data, Waze was able to put out a seemingly impossible 16 million variations of these ten ads over the span of three months. Their strategy was to use extremely granular data to target their audience with ads that seemed personal and relevant, and therefore built up trust in the user.

“Hyper-local ads [that notified users] of a specific traffic incident like, ‘Standstill Traffic on Portola Drive,’ outperformed ads that were more city-wide, such as ‘717 Live Traffic Reports in San Francisco,” shared Aman Govil, Creative Partnerships Lead at Google. The results were astronomical. Dynamic creative use increased app installs by 865% compared to static creatives, and even had a 51% lower CPI. Clearly, their UA and Design teams were on to something big with this campaign strategy.

Device-level for data-driven advertising

Vungle also has an impressive and data-driven creative strategy: using device-data to match a user with specific ads catered to their device capabilities. Si Crowhurst, Global GM of Vungle, elaborates a bit on the effectiveness of this strategy:

“For example, if a consumer has a poor connection, it is better to deliver a shorter ad that requires less bandwidth. If a consumer has their phone set to Japanese, it is best to deliver creative in Japanese. Or, if a user has a muted phone, an ad with subtitles will perform best.”

By utilizing granular device-level data, Vungle was able to pinpoint users with custom fit ads and increase campaign performance. With a strategy like this, advertisers don’t need to worry about their creatives falling flat because of a device limitation.

What unique ways are you using data to inform your creative assets? Tweet at @TweetSingular to tell us!

Stay tuned for part three of our creative optimization blog series, where we’ll focus on design trends in video! If you’d like to learn more about Singular’s Creative Optimization capabilities, request a demo here!