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Key Acronyms you should understand to survive in the Disruptive Digital Marketing arena: DCO

PUBLISHED ON 20 JANUARY, 2015

Have you done your homework and devoted some time to studying the basic principles of RTB (Real Time Bidding) and DMP (Data Management Platform)? We surely have, and are now ready to move on to the next novel concept that disrupts and enhances the contemporary Digital Marketing arena – DCO, or Dynamic Creative Optimization.

DCO can be considered to be the ultimate example of marrying cutting-edge technology with our innermost human side. Leveraging the opportunities offered by the Big Data revolution, DCO manages to focus on each individual’s particular needs and thus place both marketing and sales under the customer care command.

 

WHAT?

Dynamic Creative Optimization consists in the real time and automated adaption of one single ad template to multiple parameters that define the viewer and their context. These parameters can be very disparate: from the website visited or the viewers’ past online behaviour, to the local weather conditions or net income, depending on the availability of data.

HOW?

The mechanism is quite simple and thus even more fascinating. The advertiser provides an ad template including a number of dynamic elements that can be customised according to the data received. This, in turn, proceeds from a variety of sources:

• publisher’s first-party data: keyword searches, site visits and other behavioural patterns;
• advertiser’s first-party data: client contact information, purchase history, subscription plan, etc;
• third-party and seemingly unrelated data: demographic and statistical information, local weather, stock market situation, etc.

All of this data would typically be stored on a DMP. So in the RTB framework, the DCO system would receive the necessary information from a DMP, to then feed the instantly generated ad combination into a Demand-Side Platform (DSP), which would bid in the auction held by the ad exchange for the ad space on the publisher’s website. (good job there if you managed to read all this in one breath, but don’t panic if not – just go to the Cheat Note below)

WHY?

DCO systems open up a whole new world of possibilities for advertisers:

1. They leverage Big Data to provide the foremost personalisation, serving an ad tailored to the website visitor’s unique needs and interests;
2. They allow the visitor to get quick access to the exact content they are looking for, shortening their browsing journey, minimizing their effort and saving them time;
3. Time is also saved on the advertisers’ side: no longer does the creative team need to produce numerous ads, they just need to customise a couple of elements and set the parameters for their combination;
4. Multivariate testing is now easier and more effective, since DCO will automatically display those ads which get the higher CTR;
5. Although principally designed for advertisers, publishers could also use DCO to adjust their own content to different audiences. For instance, they can lead the visitor to various versions of the homepage to highlight different sections according to the data available on the visitor.

CONCLUSION

As you can see, DCO constitutes a valuable resource for leveraging your creative assets and adapting them to the most heterogeneous audiences. A highly recommendable companion to every digital marketer, DCO enables you to turn Big Data into Useful Data by serving ultimately personalised ads that meet the expectations of the most picky customers.

We would love to hear from you! Have you already implemented digital marketing technology to serve the needs of your business?