Before choosing a dynamic ad provider, my advice is to consider two sets of criteria so you know you’re getting a truly dynamic solution: 1.) degree of interactivity; and 2.) depth of customization.

Interactivity

Interactivity is measured by how much ability consumers have to play with content in the ad. There are three levels of commonly seen interactivity:

1. Highly Interactive Rich Media– Incorporates features like social-media feeds, videos, product scrolling, product catalog search functionality, tabs, etc.
2. Static Rich Media – May contain some animation, like a Flash introduction (think a car driving by, or automatically rotating offers), but are not controlled by the user.
3. Static Media – No interaction or animation. Like a print ad on the Internet.

Customization

Customization is measured by how tailored the ad experience is to individuals or audience segments. The three most common levels of interactivity are:

1. Real Time Customization– Personalized with content and creative assets that reflect information collected in real time when the ad call occurs. For example, information stored in the recipient’s cookies, or with contextual relevance to the environment in which the ad is served. This can include products the user looked at on a retail site, local offers based on the user’s location, or coupon codes based on a user’s historic behavior with a particular brand.
2. Templatized Customization – Features some level of personalization, but at a more basic demographic level or by behavioral segmentation (men vs. women, income level etc.). The personalization is limited to information known about the recipients when the ads are initially designed.
3. Conventional Media – Not personalized at all. Every recipient gets the same version of the ad.

It’s important to understand that interactivity and customization are not mutually exclusive. It helps to visualize them as two variables on a spectrum creating four quadrants in which an ad can fall.

They can be real-time and static, highly interactive and conventional, etc. But the only ads that are truly dynamic are the ones that fall in the upper right-hand quadrant – highly interactive with real-time customization.

I also recognize that truly dynamic creative may not be needed 100 percent of the time. It’s up to the marketer to determine the level of complexity needed to facilitate each campaign’s objectives.

So next time you sit down to plan a display campaign that calls for dynamic ads, ask yourself this question: “How dynamic are they?”

Brand advertising, however, involves ambiguous milestones that can be difficult to track and quantify, making traditional display metrics — which are contingent on a two-step action-to-conversion process — inadequate for understanding the impact of brand-focused ads.

Because of the lack of measurable insight into digital branding initiatives and the associated CPM cost structure, brand marketers have historically paired static creative with broad-based media buys.

This “spray and pray” approach to media planning is a natural carryover from 60 years’ worth of TV ad buying, for which performance is measured by impressions. But it is inefficient in today’s digital landscape.

Enter The Engagement Metric

While brand advertisers largely remain loyal to traditional static media, the shift to dynamic display has become a no-brainer for display channels like retargeting. The ability to personalize content based on a user’s first-party data has been proven to significantly improve return and conversion rate. This mass adoption of personalized, interactive media has also led to the innovation of a new metric that utilizes the improved functionality to provide more comprehensive performance insight — Consumer Engagement.

Engagement with a display ad means interacting with its elements – watching video, scrolling through products, viewing different tabs, searching for products, signing up for email, etc. —  all within the ad and without clicking-through to a landing page.

Engagement is the single best metric to measure purchase intent, and is the key to making dynamic media valuable for brand advertising. The increased functionality and creative implementation of modern banner ads enables increased brand engagement, and creates measurable milestones for identifying and influencing consumers’ positions in the brand funnel.

Engaged Consumers Nearly 500% More Likely To Visit The Brand Site

We recently tested the value of measuring engagement for a non-profit client with a goal of raising awareness of a life-threating women’s health issue. By identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) based on the brand’s goals, we were able to track ad engagement to understand the influence ads were having on its audience.

The results showed that people who engaged with ads were 493 percent more likely to visit the organization’s site. Once on the site, they were 24 percent more likely to engage in social sharing and 5 percent more likely to register for site membership.

This campaign gives a glimpse into the potential behind dynamic display as a brand advertising tool. Not only does it facilitate measurable KPIs, but it also empowers advertisers with data they can use to enhance the consumer experience and influence campaign performance.

With the greater understanding of where consumers are in the brand funnel and what previous interactions got them there, advertisers can deliver ads that are personalized with highly relevant and compelling brand content. The implications this has on campaign optimization puts Consumer Engagement in a very strong position to be the future of brand advertising.