The emergence of programmatic creative platforms has unlocked many ways to tailor, test, and optimize ad creative to drive campaign performance. When we looked into other people’s numbers, we found evidence that customizing creative consistently delivers a 30-50% boost in performance. That’s a little under our experience, where our customers that optimize creatives tend to size up to benchmarks by 2X or more.

It’s clear that in the age of so much data in digital media, the model of showing one generalized creative to everyone is giving way to a new style of advertising that combines data and creative in ways that resonate far more with audiences and produce greater results for advertisers.

But for companies seeking to leverage many of these new strategies, where does one begin? If you’re looking for examples of these ads, how can you find them?

The newest installments to our programmatic creative series of eBooks dig into precisely these questions and the strategies and tactics that new technologies like Creative Management Platforms and dynamic creative optimization make possible.

We’re calling them programmatic creative playbooks. These guides contain example ways to tailor creatives to audiences, including example ads. They are meant to serve as inspiration for the next generation of creative strategy.

Having already overtaken the majority of digital ad spend, programmatic buying continues its rapid rise.

In the US, programmatic already accounts for over two-thirds of all display media. Magna Global forecasts programmatic-driven ad spend in 2015 to hit $20.5 Bn worldwide. Growth for years ahead is projected to remain steady.

To deliver the right message to the right audience, advertisers and agencies have put about 30% of their programmatic spend, $6 Bn, into targeting technologies like DSPs and DMPs.

And yet despite spending billions, the promise of delivering the right message still hasn’t been realized.

Research by AppNexus shows that 97% of programmatic campaigns lack a targeted creative for each audience segment. That means the vast majority of programmatic campaigns use generalized or generic creatives, a factor that has lead to heavy concerns from marketers about driving ROI from big data.

It’s not all wasted data, however. Many companies have figured out how to make creative work in the programmatic era, and they are reaping the rewards:

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about the burgeoning relationship between programmatic media and ad creative. Most of the discourse has been about how optimal creative can significantly impact the performance of the media in theory. The purpose of this article is to look at the data behind what those gains might be in practice.

Creative optimization is the act of customizing and testing advertisement artwork and messaging to be more resonant with audiences. Since programmatic allows advertisers to precisely target specific audiences, these technologies have inspired advertisers to leverage creative variations for greater media effectiveness.

The dominant tactics include:

1. Customizing ad creative to what matters to specific audience groups
2. A/B testing messaging
3. Sequencing or updating messaging over time

The expectation of gains from these tactics comes from an already established success in creative relevancy and testing in email, social, search and website content. Armed with programmatic buying, big data and algorithmic optimization, advertisers hope to translate similar gains into display ads, native ads and video.

The strategies here seem sound, but what data is there to back it up?