FUN ADVERTISING 101: A little dynamic content goes along way.


First, let’s address the elephant in the room: people hate ads. Including marketers themselves. Fun fact: 70% marketers (and their interns) probably have an ad-blocker installed on their laptops or phones. All while trying to figure out how to shield their ads from being blocked by their own audience.

Why are ads so annoying?

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A digital Ad can come in many forms: text, image, video, GIF, a minigame. The formats are no different from any kind of digital content that you are consuming daily.

So why do we hate them so much?

An analogy, cringy as it sounds, can be used in this case. You meet a date for the first time. You decide: “Pfft, this is probably the last time I want to see this person. So boring”.

Now imagine, you meet 100 of these “boring” people daily.

Again and again. And they are all the same.

Ads are not too far from that. Worse, these “people” not only find your house, knock at your door, enter your room, sit in front of your face. Like a Psycho.

There are 2 options: call the police or pull out a 9-inch pistol. But of course, you cannot shoot your newly bought iPhoneX-(whatever). So you go online and search for the best blockers out there on the internet.

So do we really hate Ads?

Just because some people are boring, it does not mean that you hate everyone. It works the same with Ads. Some Ads are so impactful that we even talk about them in our office gossip.

But even for those, seeing too much of them eventually becomes a bore. Experienced marketers know this. That is probably the reason why the more impactful an Ad is, the shorter its shelf-life. Avoid beating the dead horse. No matter how good it was when alive.

But I do not have that kind of budget!

The truth is the only casual relationship between an Ad and its success is the amount of (free) money it gives when being clicked, viewed, or interacted. The rest are still black boxes that are so unpredictable even for experienced marketers. Oftentimes, money are thrown into the ring without a guarantee of an outcome.

So what can you do? What if you are a marketer who does not have a mammoth-size budget for the most good looking actors (and their dance crews) or the coolest visual effects that rival the latest Hollywood sci-fi .

You make it relevant.

Here is the game plan. Just as there is no need to drive a shiny BMW to pick up your date while wearing Zegna (maybe some of you do), there is hardly a need to be super fancy with Ads. Just be super effective.

“How?” You ask. Here is a 5-step plan:

  1. Study your audience

  2. Make hypotheses about what make them tick

  3. Make different ads design/concepts for each hypothesis

  4. Test them out. Collect results. Figure out what works and what doesn’t

  5. Iterate and repeat. Adapt for the next concept/design

Of course, in this day and age, you do not have that much time or resources to go through this step-wise. All steps should happen pretty much in tandem.

If you are in Digital Marketing space, you are in luck. Technologies (such as ours) can allow you to dynamically jazz up content and adapt for each of the hypothesis. With a combination of performance tracking, you can also see how each of your creative concepts rolls out and adapt them pretty much in matter of days.

Some examples of the Dynamic Ads that we support:

Location and Weather

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Interest and Behaviour-based

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The End Note

Just like dating, there is nothing wrong with being yourself, even if that person on the end doesn’t like you. But the bigger question is: “If I get to meet the person once again, how would I have done differently”.