Dynamic Content Ad Standards
Programmatic buying and selling of advertising has made dynamic media a reality with individual ad placements chosen based on an avalanche of data.
While to date, data has been mostly used to inform the media components of the ad, ad tech’s embrace of the creative half of the ad equation is exploding, reflecting marketer’s desire to bring the best technology forward to optimize the right message part of the holy trinity of the right message, right person, right place and time with “dynamic” creative.
The need is coming from agencies and brands under two major requirements:
- A desire to optimize content advertising on social media and other content distribution platforms. In this environment, it quickly becomes overwhelming for an agency to create the myriad versions of the same content necessary to cover multiple platforms. Often, this is as simple as a headline, key visual, disclosure, brand ID, and a call to action—yet varying specs can make versioning onerous to say the least.
- The other need has been that marketers are recognizing the need for “in-the moment” messaging where getting the right message at the right time to the user could significantly influence purchase decisions.
Media targeting has gotten much better, but creative has barely evolved. A leap forward was made with version one of dynamic creative optimization, but last generation DCO was limited by the need to create multiple finished ads (that were dynamically served based on decision engines, not dynamically created.) Recently, however, the groundwork has been laid for a massive leap forward in truly dynamic advertising as marketers’ ability to create more distinct commercial options and creative assets catches up with ad tech’s ability to target, render, and serve them.
Dynamic Content Ad Standard Specification
There is both a need and opportunity driving the demand for Dynamic Ad Content specification that will enable efficient communication of all the permutations and combinations of different ad content components. A standard specification will enable dynamic content ad server platforms to render and optimize the creative ad components in real time as well as effective post campaign reporting and tracking.
These new standards will represent a win/win/win for the digital ecosystem. Viewers will get more relevant ads better integrated into their digital experience; marketers will benefit with greater effectiveness, and publishers and ad tech companies will see the resultant growth from delivering greater value.
Of perhaps equal importance to the ad ops and ad tech communities, robust standards will create a foundation for development and implementation that will lead to faster, easier adoption and the freeing up of resources for innovation
To enable the efficient scaling of content advertising, the IAB Tech Lab will create Dynamic Content Ad Standards Specification.
Related Documents
IAB Advertising Creative Guidelines for Display & Mobile—Updated for HTML5
Developed by the Dynamic Content Ad Standards Working Group
IAB Tech Lab Lead
Shailley Singh
Executive Vice President, Product & Chief Operating Officer
support@dev.iabtechlab.com