No matter when and where your customers engage with your display advertising, they’re looking for five things: Personalization, relevance, seamlessness, transparency, and value.
In other words, they seek dynamic creative ads that are nearly prescient and perfectly placed. And, preferably, ones with a dash of wit and charm to make them memorable.
Seem like an unattainable wishlist? We get it. We also have tips and tricks to share that should make winning the display advertising game much more feasible.
How We Got Here—The Evolution of Expectations in Display Advertising
Digital display advertising dates back to the internet’s earliest days, with brands such as AT&T and Volvo jumping on the early banner ad bandwagon. In the ‘90s, this was brand-new tech.
Today, digital advertising is a behemoth. (The U.S. digital ad market is predicted to surpass $300 billion by 2025.) Digital advertising is surprisingly resilient, too, with most industries continuing to invest in great ads through the good times and the bad.
A relatively new trend in this space is advertising personalization. Platforms such as Facebook and Google collect billions of data points from their users, allowing savvy advertisers to inch closer to their goals of tailoring ads to discrete target demographics. Brands have also been increasingly collecting their own customer data through various channels, such as their website, email funnels, and applications allowing them to further personalize their ads.
But that only introduces new challenges.
For example, if the advertising dream is to deliver stunningly individualized creative to ever-more-specific audience segments, that’s going to require a lot (a lot) of resources.
Enter: Dynamic creative ads—and the advent of programmatic display advertising. Now, we can roll out ad campaigns based on real-time data, and those ads are far from static and impersonal. They're responsive, adaptable, and, most importantly, relevant.
Which—helpfully—is precisely what today’s customers are looking for.
Current and Future Customer Expectations from Advertising: An Ambitious Advertiser’s Checklist
If you want your ads to stand out in a crowded marketplace (and for those ads to act as magnets for your customers), you need to incorporate these five things:
1. Personalization
The human brain loves bespoke content. Consumers want to see ads that call their name—if not literally, then at least in content that caters to their individual preferences and behaviors. In years past, we’ve had to guess and generalize instead of truly personalizing campaigns. Today, with access to vast amounts of data and AI-powered tools to help us produce content at scale, personalization is much more possible.
2. Relevance
For your ads to catch wandering eyes, they must resonate with immediate needs. (The goal is to give customers the feeling that you’re reading their minds, or even that you’re one step ahead of them at all times.) Dynamic creative optimization solutions can process customers’ engagement and deliver pitch-perfect content. These solutions can help you ensure relevance, so you put the right content in the right context every single time.
3. Seamless Omnichannel Experience
Customers seek consistency. It helps them understand and feel connected to their favorite brands. Oddly disconnected ads across different channels, from social media to email, SMS, or OOH campaigns, only confuse people. Investing in a unified back-end CX system can make it simple for your team to ensure ads and creative flow smoothly from one channel to the next.
4. Transparency and Control
Customers aren’t just passively taking ads in anymore. They’re educated. They’re involved. They want to know how their data’s being used, and they want to be able to engage with and even control their digital advertising experiences. Studies show that a sizable percentage of consumers are okay with data sharing, as long as they know it’s improving their experience. Clarifying how you use data and allowing customers to control how they engage with ads will go a long way toward achieving that goal.
5. Value-Driven Content
Today’s ads need to do more than just make customers aware of a new offering; that’s no longer exciting. Customers want ads that offer good content in and of themselves. Ideally, today’s digital ad creative should enrich, educate, and engage customers.
Of course, that will take extra effort, but it'll be worth it. Value-driven content helps make your brand stand out, builds your relationship with your customers, and makes you seem inherently valuable and trustworthy.
Is It Time to Do More with Your Display Advertising?
Personalization, relevance, seamless omnichannel experiences, transparency, value: These aren’t just buzzwords. They’re expectations your customers really have.
And, fortunately, they’re more achievable aspects of display advertising than you may think. With today’s available dynamic creative creation, optimization, and delivery solutions, you can go the extra mile to ensure your ads are everything they need to be—without expending endless resources or burning out your team.
Curious to learn more? We’ve got you covered. Learn more about Innervate’s offerings by clicking right here.
