For publishers with multiple web properties, selling a cross-site, nationwide display ad campaign to a single advertiser can be a powerful (and profitable) way to demonstrate your reach. Cox Media Group, which reaches 52 million Americans a week in 20 markets across its 85+ media properties, is an attractive partner for national brands who want to reach local audiences with targeted messaging. But executing complex campaigns across geographies can require technical savvy, so CMG, a longtime Clipcentric partner, reached out to us to help solve a particularly challenging ad build.

The campaign itself was relatively simple: a nationwide ad buy from a prominent lawn tractor manufacturer. The ad campaign included some dynamic components that showed different discount deals on various tractor models, and then optimized the campaign over time so that the deal/tractor combination that generated the most clicks “won out” and was shown more and more as the campaign progressed. That type of dynamic creative optimization, or DCO, is built right into Clipcentric’s platform and easy to pull off. The ad format, a standard banner ad (responsive, of course), cycled through three different panels.

But the brand wanted more -- based on the location of the ad viewer, they wanted to show the name and phone number of the local tractor dealer in that market. With close to 300 dealers and distributors, this inflated the number of potential ad variants to somewhere north of 750.

Hundreds of Variants. One Ad Tag.

Jennifer Dragon, Creative Services Director for Cox Media Group Local Solutions, was left trying to figure out how to manage implementation of hundreds of ad tags. How would she ensure that the right creative, with the appropriate dealer name and phone number, was served on the right local site? And then how would she also layer DCO, testing tractor and pricing combinations, on top of that?

Dragon relied on the Clipcentric team and technology to help her make the campaign a success, and to avoid having her team spend hours and hours manually creating an unfathomable number of ad variants to produce tags. 

“The Clipcentric team is so super to work with,” Dragon said. “They are so accessible and so free with their time,” she added. 

Clipcentric’s solution was simple, and resulted in a single ad tag that ran the entire campaign, including DCO and dynamic versioning that could automatically serve ad variants with different dealer names and phone numbers off of a single creative template. 

Dragon and her team worked with the brand to gather a spreadsheet of ZIP codes and the associated dealer names and phone numbers that aligned with each geographic territory. Then, her design team quickly built the basic ad template in Clipcentric’s ad studio, a layer-based design tool that makes it easy to create rich media ads in their various states based on device. The template included three different pricing/tractor combinations for the DCO portion of the campaign. Additionally, the ad template made use of Clipcentric’s “data feed” widget, leaving a space along the bottom of the ad template for customized information (the dealer name and phone) to be input into the ad creative and served on-the-fly as the campaign ran.

Clipcentric’s data feed allows publishers to use first-party data (crucial in today’s world of cookie eradication) to customize ad units. In this case, Dragon and her team used their dealer spreadsheet as the data source, and then set the ad viewer’s geographic location as the trigger that would then pull from the list the appropriate dealer info and populate the ad with it. In the meantime, Clipcentric’s DCO engine would also test different tractor images and pricing offers on the ad, learning over time which performed best and then zeroing in on that combination to drive click-throughs. 

Combining DCO and Dynamic Versioning

“The platform worked like magic, as it always does,” said Dragon. Her team simply needed to schedule a single ad tag in their server to generate a multifaceted, geo-specific campaign with hundreds of creative variants.

At the campaign’s conclusion, Dragon had real-time DCO data right from Clipcentric’s platform to share with the brand on how different tractor and pricing variants performed, as well as metrics on which geographic areas, and their associated dealers, saw the most impressions and clicks.

The campaign exemplifies what all of Clipcentric’s customers have come to expect: the combination of technology, service, expertise, and flexibility that help publishers and advertisers efficiently develop and deploy campaigns that deliver. 

Try it out! Click here to see a generic version of how this campaign worked.
Enter ZIP codes 12155, 12801, or 12203 to see the name of the tractor dealer change.