As written in my last post, google wants to go more into display advertisement, and one of the most reaction they got was on dynamic display ads.
Dynamic ads are not new for google, their text ads are basically dynamic ads. Depending on search term a text ad can have different content and be still the same ad. As an example I could buy into google ads. Would define the search terms when the ad shall be displayed and have the text ad displaying the search term. Like "xxx for the best deal in town, click here". Xxx stands for the search term the user did look for. How often did we click on an ad because our search term was in the ad but the target domain had nothing to do with our search. Now you know why.
However not many companies are using this methodology for their display ads.
Google gave an example for display ads for dynamic content based on location.
Depending on the weather the ad would look different. It is a cool idea, as long the users IP address is in the correct zip code. Imagine you would surf the Internet from Florida but your IP would represent Alaska and the displayed ad would show snow and winter tires, this would not really make sense.
Changing ads by weather condition is not hard if we assume we can figure out the correct zip code, but the question what to show depending on weather will get very philosophical. As a travel agency, is it better to show during snowing an ad for vacation on Hawaii or an ad for a short trip to a ski resort around the corner?
Really interesting are dynamic display ads when they change the content depending on the content the user is reading or looking for.
Maybe an ad could show "save on chicken at Walmart in Orlando", If an user from Orlando searches on a recipe site for chicken recipes, but if somebody searches for chicken wings and is located in Tampa, the same ad would show "save on fresh cooked chicken wings at Walmart in Tampa" etc.
Dynamic ads can get much more personal if they are on sites where the user signed in with Facebook connect and agreed on that the site can use his Facebook data.
The limit is the sky and our privacy settings.
But how do these dynamic ads work?
It is a pretty simple method. The ad might be done in flash, the content of the flash comes from an XML, this XML is dynamic generated by certain parameters like zip code.
The agency would build multiple versions of an image (with snow, rain, sun etc.) then a code in the backend would read the IP address of user and compares the IP with stored information in a DB to find correct zip code, this zip code would be send to weather.com to get weather information. The XML would then contain a rain image.
Similar approach for dynamic ad in search results. Instead of building 100 different ads and upload them to an ad server, the agency could build one ad for uploading which would read an XML, which gets it's information dynamically from a DB which contains a lot of different images which are tagged with keywords. The text of the ad would repeat the search term by reading the search term from page etc.
I tried to be simple and therefor not technical correct.
At the end the question is not if dynamic ads or not. There is no doubt it will come more, especially when combined with cookie, location, content relevance, behavior and social information.
The question will be if such approach is paying off (ROI), does it really raise the CTR (click through rate), does it help for better branding, or is it just expensive and has no added value?
The time and experience will show. Right now it brings a lot of PR for the agencies who are offering such service and a lot of PR for brands which are using the service. But what is, when it is commodity?
As great dynamic advertising is, it might never be commodity, because the law could change. Which would as well reduce extremely all other targeted advertising.
On July 19, Illinois Representative Bobby Rush, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Commerce Trade and Consumer Protection, introduced HR 5777, the Best Practices Act. This bill is similar to the Boucher proposal introduced in May by Rep. Rick Boucher and Rep. Cliff Stearns in that it would regulate the online and offline collection, use and disclosure of covered information and would regulate behavioral advertising.
Click here if you would like to read the bill (PDF format)
http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100720/HR5777_introduced.PDF
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