DCO in Decline: Is It Still Worth Implementing?

What is DCO?

Advertising has evolved immensely over the years, with many new, increasingly innovative ways to engage with audiences. One example is Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), a technique that enables advertisers to create personalised and relevant ads at scale. There has been a big focus on ad personalisation and DCO advertising; though, cookies and regulations make it increasingly difficult to actually launch those campaigns to the entire market. Is it worth focusing on DCO when it only accounts for 10% of your ad effectiveness? 

DCO technology can automatically build multiple versions of an ad using the same creative base, while tailoring dynamic elements. These elements are carefully personalised based on a wide range of data sources, like user behaviour history, location information, external data like weather conditions, and other contextual data. 

By using DCO, advertisers can dynamically create highly personalised ad components that resonate with individual users, delivering a more relevant and engaging advertising experience. 

Moving away from DCO

DCO has been a vital part of personalised campaigns, but with privacy concerns and regulatory changes, companies need to reevaluate their approach. Overall, while the use of third-party cookies can enhance the effectiveness of DCO, it is not essential for implementing a successful campaign strategy. 

As DCO is costly to implement and only accounts for 10% of your ad effectiveness, it might be better to focus on the other 90% of your campaign set-up to bring your ads to a higher level (both back and front end). 

So, which road should you take?

Advertisers can still achieve significant results by leveraging first-party data and contextual targeting. Platforms like Cape offer alternatives to DCO, achieving similar results without relying on cookies.

With Cape you can use feeds to make endless ad variations based on all kinds of data. Facilitate a fully data-driven and audience-based campaign setup to make campaigns highly relevant, hyperlocal and tailored to the wants and needs of the consumer.

With one masterfile and one template you can generate countless ad variants for different audience interest groups, without touching a single button. We believe in the strength of a smart campaign setup that drives your speed-to-market. Connect real-time data to your campaigns and transform your ads in just seconds. Integrate data feeds to boost creative variety and perfectly match your target audience anytime, anywhere. Optimise ad relevance by automatically adjusting translations, weather, price feeds, and more. And automatically push and pause campaigns depending on real-time location and consumer data.