How dynamic creative will (finally) reach the tipping point

In an industry where a lot of lip service is paid to one-to-one marketing and tailoring a brand’s advertising to the individual, far too few brands have harnessed the power of dynamic creative for their campaigns. There’s a simple reason for that: It’s hard. Despite extensive evidence of dynamic creative’s effectiveness, certain stars in the dynamic creative space simply haven’t aligned to enable the segment to tip over into widespread adoption. But that’s about to change. In fact, it’s changing as we speak. Here are the two critical shifts that are going to put dynamic creative into the majority of digital campaigns going forward. Over the past few years, the race toward programmatic has put creative on the back burner. Distribution and technology have been prioritized over the ads themselves, and that’s a problem. For marketing and advertising to be successful, the creative and messaging must be the focal point. Our industry’s technology obsession is also the reason dynamic creative hasn’t reached a tipping point yet. A great deal of technological complexity has been introduced into the creative process, and that’s counterintuitive to how great creative is produced. We’ve sliced and diced the ads in a number of ways, and the resulting processes for producing the ads (and the interfaces designed to “facilitate” the process) are exceptionally cumbersome and not the least bit intuitive. Great creative minds simply can’t shine when bogged down by such systems. It’s not how they work.