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Is Your Advertising Campaign As Stale As That Ad?

AVP site only ChoiceStream headshotIn the age of Big Data, most brands have access to a plethora of consumer information. Though many use this intel to enhance campaign targeting, few are leveraging these insights to create truly engaging and relevant display ads.

If your brand is still serving up static display ads to a broad base of consumers, you’re stuck in 2010 — and you’re not getting the most bang for your buck.

Personalization and geolocation are not new concepts in the world of e-Commerce, but they’re changing the way that innovative brands are driving more views and engagement, and ultimately more sales. These savvy advertisers are leveraging customer information like age, gender, location, income, hobbies, and interests, as well as purchase motivators like value, fashion and comfort to present dynamic ads that are relevant to each individual and to the context in which they are viewing the ad.

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Dynamic advertising couples meaningful, interactive creative ad design with tailored messages of offers that speak to a consumer’s interests. Here are some examples of how brands have used dynamic advertising to engage consumers in more visual and evocative ways:

Weather Feeds

By pulling direct, real-time feeds from weather forecast sites, advertisers are able to provide each consumer with a hyperlocal ad experience. An ad becomes a source of information for outside temperatures, SPF indexes, and humidity, and by doing so it creates a personal connection with a consumer. Retailers capitalize on weather forecasts by accompanying them with appropriate product suggestions — wedges for summer weather, rain boots for heavy rain, and so on. One leading online shoe and apparel retailer used weather feeds to deliver 45% new customers during a recent holiday season.

Varied Styles By Geography

Regional styles and weather patterns can also impact the success of display ads. New York Fashion Week, for example, attracts East Coast consumers to different clothing than West Coast consumers, who are influenced by Los Angeles Fashion Week. On the other hand, while parents in Florida may be in the market for swim diapers, parents in Maine might be purchasing snowsuits. Brands can create interactive ads with click-through carousels that show the best sellers in the viewer’s region. This can be done by incorporating first-party, geo-based fashion data into the dynamic component of the ad.

Countdown Clock

This dynamic feature allows brands to capitalize on upcoming events, sales and offer deadlines. When retailers build countdown clocks into their display ads, it allows them to stay relevant with the consumer. Not only does the product messaging apply to the persona viewing the ad, but the clock provides added information that helps the consumer in his or her shopping decisions.

This ad component becomes especially compelling for last-minute shoppers as events and holidays like back-to-school, Christmas, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day approach. The clock can be customized to specific time zones and contain a countdown of days, hours, minutes and even seconds until the event or the last chance to ship the product in time for the event.

Store Locator

Retailers can also increase relevance by building a store locator into their display ads. Today, many brands go beyond simply listing the miles to the nearest physical store address. They factor in further details, such as local inventory availability, ship-to-store savings, store hours, and even directions. Think With Google has stated that stores like Sears saw a 122% increase in store visits when the brand used local inventory ads rather than simply showing a product within a digital ad. That organization’s research also states that consumers are much more likely to pursue an offer within an ad when the creative includes information like the price of the item, stock information, a phone number for the closest store location, a map, and other similar items that are available for purchase.   

Interactivity

Retailers can capitalize on the dimensions of a simple digital ad by incorporating interactive components into display and mobile creative. Multiple product carousels, product look-books, and polls all draw more consumer attention and enable shoppers to navigate their own experiences.

As flash animation and HTML5 evolve, advertisers are leveraging that innovation within display and mobile ads. Brands that look beyond the standard dimensions of an ad can take full advantage of the space they have and create dynamic interactive ads that increase engagement and performance.

Ratings And Reviews

Consumers — especially Millennials — highly value product reviews over other brand marketing. After all, studies have shown that Millennials are 2.3 times more likely to click on content that has been shared by their peers.

Levi’s can say that their slimming, pull-on legging “contours to your natural movements and creates a flattering shape.” However, a review from 31-year-old Erica, who says she waits by the dryer for these jeans to be ready to wear will truly influence a woman in her thirties who is looking for jeans.

By building customer reviews into dynamic creative, brands can use display ads to share the voice of their loyalists with peers who value that opinion. Building geo-based product reviews into creative combines the benefits of local personalization and consumer opinion.

Capitalizing On Viral Trends

Brands can further increase the relevance of their digital ads by taking advantage of cultural moments and social sensations. A great example of this is Oreo’s social media team taking advantage of a power outage at the Superbowl a few years back. They jumped on the blackout moment and tweeted an image of an Oreo cookie with the tagline “you can still dunk in the dark.” This type of quick thinking allows brands to hit home with consumer experiences, and it can be carried over to digital advertising, thereby reaching tens of millions of targeted consumers with trending social content.

More recently, with the “what color is this dress?” controversy that went viral, people across the nation found themselves arguing about whether an ordinary dress looked blue and black or white and gold. Retailers could have (and some did) exploited this popularity by quickly developing and running an ad that made a play on this popular yet trivial debacle.  

In conclusion, retail brands should plan promotional creative through display advertising as part of their integrated marketing calendars. Brand marketers can make use of their core understanding of customers, as well as their data and dynamic ad capabilities, in order to customize digital creative to each consumer’s interests. With all brands fighting for viewability and share of wallet, the retailers that demonstrate that they “get” their customers, and make shopping easy and fun, will increase return on investment and grow shopping cart values.


Anna McCarthy is Vice President of Client Services at ChoiceStream. She works with top, online brands to manage and optimize highly targeted digital advertising and branding campaigns. Reach her at amccarthy@choicestream.com.

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