AOL announced the addition of One By AOL: Creative to the company’s advertising automation platform on Tuesday. The new unit is aimed at simplifying creative delivery and using data insights to automatically inform which creative assets should be shown in which formats to specific audiences across screens.
“AOL is on a mission to greatly simplify the chaos prevalent in digital advertising. Creative development, one of the most capital-intensive parts of the advertising process, is certainly no exception,” said AOL president Bob Lord in a statement. “With ONE by AOL: Creative, AOL is not replacing the human touch of the creative process with robots; we are empowering all constituents with data and automation to help inform intelligent, human-driven design and creative that meaningfully elevates business results.”
The new creative platform is an overhaul of Pictela (AOL is retiring the brand name with this launch). Over past 18 months, AOL rebuilt the Pictela platform into one with dynamic capabilities and the ability to pull in data from other components and still leverage the nearly 600 ad unit templates already available in Pictela. The new platform also offers an open canvas to allow agencies to use other ad formats or bring in their own experiences.
Instead of going through long creative approval processes for individual ad formats, the platform can ingest huge amounts of assets from companies and then automatically populate ad templates with content housed in the platform.
David Miller, AOL’s VP of advertising product management, explained the thought behind the revamp: “Our partners felt like there was a piece missing in creative. They have lots of data, but don’t feel like they have good insights on creatives that they’re sharing with users. . . What kind of content are users going to want to interact with, and what can we pull in from partners that will get people to interact?”
Data automation is where One by AOL: Creative’s real potential lies. AOL says Creative will be able to combine asset management with data and analytics insights to dynamically serve creatives in real time across screens based on audience targets and what the system determines is working to connect with those audiences.
Advertisers can use rules to deliver user-targeted ad creative based to specific audiences or use AOL’s optimization algorithms that adjust creatives on the fly based on what creative is connecting best for certain audiences. It becomes a continuous loop of creative testing based on real-time user engagement with the ads.
Because One by AOL is an open platform, customers can use the creative tags generated in One By AOL: Creative and distribute ads through another DSP or ad server, or they can distribute ads through AOL’s own display and video DSPs.
One by AOL: Creative is rolling out in the US, UK and Canada now and will expand to other markets in the coming quarters.
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