What is DCO?

Why Original Content Creation is the Perfect Fuel for DCO

The effectiveness and ROI of advertising in digital media make it the undisputed king of all media, and it’s about to get even better with Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO). DCO merges brand creative with data learnings to create dynamic content that directly targets different audiences in real-time.

Despite the heavy lifting required to make DCO work, the logic behind it is quite simple:

1. Create a canvas with placeholders for assets.
2. Create all the possible variations of the assets.
3. Feed an AI engine with every possible data source available.
4. Based on the data fed to it, use the AI engine to figure out the best possible combination of assets for each placeholder in the canvas to maximize conversion.
5. Use the canvas to build a digital ad in real time using these assets ideally suited to the person it’s being served to.

Creating empty creative

Regardless of the immense efforts for standardization constantly being made by the digital ad tech community, there’s still no getting around the fact that each channel in digital media still has its own set of rules and specifications. This means that for DCO to work across channels, we need to create a canvas for each channel where we plan to serve content.  The good news is, we only need to create one physical asset for each channel and have DCO serve an infinite number of variations. This solves a problem that most brands have: not having the time to shoot and produce all of the specific variations of assets they would need to personalize content to each of their target audiences.

The challenge here is for creative designers to be able to visualize how a brand’s products can be combined in any way within an empty canvas to target specific audiences. To make a DCO stragety successful, all content should maintain a consistant quality and follow brand guidelines. The more variations that are allowed for the canvas, the more options the AI engine will have to choose from.

Data-driven content

Regardless of media or format, one of the biggest challenges marketers now have is being able to digest the immense amount of data that’s available to them at any given moment that can make or break a campaign. It’s simply not humanly possible to extract, structure, analyze and identify insights from the vast amounts of data fast enough, this is where machine learning comes in. AI technology enables marketers to extract real time actionable insights by analyzing infinite amounts of data from online and offline sources every second.

There are several robust ad tech platforms that allow brands to combine the power of asset production automation with real-time data analysis and machine learning. In other words, creating real-time content based on data that results in a continuously optimized conversion rate for any and every ad campaign.

The perfect fuel for DCO

Being able to produce an almost infinite amount of variations of a digital asset requires brands to rethink the way they create their original content. DCO requires creative that is able to layer elements individually as needed, therefore brands need to fuel their campaigns with a constant stream of assets that can function individually or in any combination needed.

CreativeDrive has developed proprietary technology and a global infrastructure that allows us to be able to provide brands with a fast and efficient original content creation using our vast network of studios and talent around the globe, or our cutting-edgecrowd-sourced CGI engine.  Every piece of original content we produce is fed into a process that allows metadata to travel with it every step of the way, resulting in a constant stream of assets and data that can be delivered properly into any DCO platform in the market.