I’m often asked whether it is better to change an ad to fit an audience, or to change an audience to fit an ad in display advertising.
Many in the online advertising industry are familiar with the concept of dynamic creative, which customizes the content of an ad to match the interests of the user seeing the ad.
Dynamic creative is used heavily in the site retargeting space, where there is a fixed audience that has been defined as a group of users who have visited the advertiser’s site.
Typically the ad is customized to show the user a product that he/she has recently viewed on the advertiser’s site, or left abandoned in an online shopping cart.
Is this case, it is very effective to dynamically change an ad while the audience pool remains fixed.
However, there are many cases in online advertising where it can be more effective to use a fixed set of creative, and to dynamically change the audience to maximize ROI.