What is Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO)?

By Celtra

Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) is the real time process by which advertisers can personalize advertising creative. This involves the use of various technologies to deliver ads based on user data and their context, such as gender, age, location, purchase history, weather conditions, and more in order to make it hyper-relevant (think of DCO as intelligent advertising customized for the person looking at it). Unsurprisingly, this approach has been shown to boost advertising performance and cost efficiencies, which is why DCO has become the center of conversation in the advertising world.

As you might imagine, this requires vast amounts of data and hundreds, if not thousands, of creative units for a single placement. Like with most things that are data-driven, DCO is only as good as your data (a topic for another blog). While this may seem like a daunting task, tools, such as Celtra’s Creative Management Platform (CMP), assume most of the burden by automating repetitive and laborious tasks.

To illustrate how DCO can take personalization to another level, imagine a man sees an ad promoting a sports jersey. The ad promotes jerseys for men, women, boys and girls of a popular New York team because the advertiser is targeting New Yorkers based on IP address. The problem is that this man is single, and his favorite team plays in Dallas, so this ad has little relevance.

With DCO, however, the ad can intelligently configure itself to make it far more relevant to this viewer. In this case, the man will see an ad that shows jerseys for men only and, based on his purchase history, displays the jersey of his favorite team in Dallas. Furthermore, the ad can be made contextually relevant by replacing the jersey with a poncho if it’s raining.

This brief example is just a taste of what’s possible with DCO but it should be sufficient to help you understand the basics of what it is and how it works. It is a game changer and should be a part of every advertiser’s arsenal of advertising best practices.

This is just the first of many DCO topics we’ll be covering in future blogs, so be sure to check back regularly!

It looks like you’re using an Ad Blocker.

Many services block the full experience of Celtra’s website, so please consider disabling your Ad Blocker and refreshing the page. Thanks!

Close