TRAVEL Understanding Creative Management Platforms A travel marketer’s guide to its features and tools
Table of contents
What is a Creative Management Platform? And how does it help travel marketers? • But how did we get here? • The story behind the Bannerflow CMP
Part 1: Removing the pain of digital advertising Chapter 1 - Building your travel campaign ads • Producing master creatives efficiently • Building a master creative without a CMP • Display ad production with a CMP
Chapter 2 - Mass-production of your travel ads • More banners, more conversions • Producing travel campaigns without a CMP • Scaling ads with a creative management platform
Chapter 3 - Translating your ad campaigns • Good translation management is essential • Translating travel campaigns without a CMP • Translation management with a CMP
Chapter 4 - Using rich media in travel advertising • Innovative design in a competitive market • Creating rich media ads without a CMP • Producing rich media banners with a CMP
Chapter 5 - Collaborating on travel projects • Optimising your workflows for better performance • Team collaboration without a CMP • Team collaboration with a CMP
Chapter 6 - Publishing your travel campaigns • Publish with ease, everywhere • How to publish display campaigns without a CMP • How you publish campaigns with a CMP
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Part 2: Mastering your digital campaigns Chapter 7 - Using dynamic creative in your ads • Hyper-relevant and engaging ads that convert • Using data feeds in your banners without a CMP • Producing dynamic creative campaigns with a CMP
Chapter 8 - Landing Pages for all your travel ads • Tailoring every aspect of your campaigns • Creating landing pages without a builder tool • Mass producing your landing pages with a CMP
Chapter 9 - Scheduling your ads, for every occasion • Planning your campaigns, 365 days in advance • The old way of scheduling • Scheduling display advertising with a CMP
Chapter 10 - Analytics and campaign optimisation • Real-time insight and better return on investment • Ad analytics and optimising without a CMP • Using analytics to optimise travels ads via a CMP
Part 3: Embracing the future of travel advertising Chapter 11 - Dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) • Personalising your display campaigns with DCO • Producing personalised ads without a CMP • Dynamic Creative Optimisation with a CMP
Chapter 12 - Media Buying • Acquiring the best programmatic ad inventory • Media buying before a CMP • Media buying via a premium CMP
Chapter 13 - Digital out-of-home (DOOH) • Expanding the horizons of your travel campaigns • Digital out-of-home without a CMP • Digital out-of-home with a CMP
Conclusion
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What is a Creative Management Platform? And how does it help travel marketers?
It’s a description that has grown within digital advertising circles but what exactly is a creative management platform, or CMP? In its simplest form, a creative management platform is cloud-based software that allows travel marketing teams to produce, distribute, and measure the performance of digital advertising. It is essentially a range of advertising technologies all rolled into one easy-touse platform. Most CMPs will offer the following capabilities:
• A builder tool to design creatives • A scaling tool to mass produce creatives • A publishing tool with network integration (banner builders won’t offer this!) However, that’s not enough for today’s travel marketer. The enterprise-level CMPs empower users further through:
• • • • •
Collaboration being at the heart of the platform The capability to work across multiple markets Analytics, and optimisation tools for all campaigns The ability to schedule and publish in real-time Enabling live, data driven dynamic content as well as automatic optimisation
• Allowing video to be an integral part of all ad building • Integration with digital out-of-home advertising networks • Seamless processes between design and publication via media buying In many ways, CMPs act as an in-house agency for travel brands – reducing time, maximising production, and most importantly, enabling marketing teams to create better advertising. They are also ideally suited for travel advertising. Indeed, CMPs enable better management of campaigns with long sales-cycles and numerous touchpoints. Plus, they help to reduce cart-abandonment. When advertising online today, having access to a CMP is essential.
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But how did we get here? Thanks to advances in digital technology, such as programmatic advertising, it became possible to buy and sell adverts online with ease. However, the incredibly fast development of media buying was not matched with advances in production and distribution technologies. For example, while it is perfectly possible to buy an impression and serve your advert in seconds, it can still take weeks to build a banner campaign. Sadly for up the majority of marketers this old way of working – without a CMP – is still the reality of digital advertising.
The story behind the Bannerflow CMP Bannerflow’s founders set out to eliminate unnecessary complexity within ad production and reintroduce creativity and innovation back into digital marketing. Daniel Jacobsson, the original founder of Bannerflow, began his career as a designer at a well-known online brand in Malta, in the late 2000s. Fresh off the boat, he was looking forward to creating innovative digital advertisements. Who wouldn’t? Yet, the reality couldn’t have been more different. Jacobsson soon discovered that much of his day- to-day work involved tedious repetitive design tasks. But then something happened – he began to imagine ways to make his life as a banner designer less monotonous. He started to design tools that simplified time consuming tasks, and removed wasteful repetitive design processes. ... Trapped in the same routine was Daniel Fahlén, a marketing manager, and future co-founder of Bannerflow. Like Jacobsson, he too was wasting valuable time on poor processes. He found himself part of chaotic email threads and endlessly opening zip files. He also knew there had to be a better way. Needless to say, Fahlén and Jacobsson were kindred spirits. Joining forces, they saw the opportunity to design more features to benefit how he and countless other marketing managers worked.
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Methodically, they set to work. The result: creating thousands of banners, for multiple markets, went from weeks to days. And over a period of a few years, the Bannerflow CMP was born. High-performing, in-house digital display advertising – via a CMP – became a reality.
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Part 1: Removing the pain of digital advertising Solving the problems of display ad production In the following six chapters we identify and compare how a CMP removes the pain points and inefficiencies of the “old way” of online marketing. Exploring how the features of a CMP help to to optimise a travel brand’s inhouse ad production. From the designer wasted on repetitive tasks, to the marketing manager coordinating campaigns all via a spreadsheet, to the CMO bored with opening countless email attachments: this e-book explains how there is a better way to work.
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Chapter 1 Building your travel campaign ads Producing master creatives efficiently Producing the master creative for any campaign is key. It sets the tone for an entire travel campaign. The easier it is to produce an optimised ad – the quicker time to market. It’s why an ad builder – even one not associated with a CMP – is such a popular tool for online marketers. Moreover, to create truly effective travel advertising, ads must perform across formats, devices, and customised messages. This means producing ads quickly and in high volume. Undertaking a programmatic campaign with less than 10 different sizes is meaningless!
Building a master creative without a CMP Before ad builder tools, creating the first banner of a campaign was far more complicated than it needed to be. Once a marketing manager planned a travel campaign – with (or without) a media agency – they would decide where and to whom each campaign should be placed or run. This set the requirements for banners produced in terms of weights, sizes, and formats, etc. The production agency, or in-house team, then produced the creative material. Normally, a coder and graphic designer were required. If the ads were technically advanced they may have required both frontend and backend developers. For each display campaign, a designer would use their skills to produce a master creative and two standard sized banners. Yet, for the subsequent 493 they would be reduced to a human robot. This essentially means copying and pasting from excel spreadsheets, taking 1500 screenshots to create fall-back images and then uploading one-by-one to a chosen ad network.
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Furthermore, a designer would need to optimise every single banner as there were strict file size regulations. Some networks would only allow 40kb – certain platforms 70kb. A painful exercise that wasted precious time. There were specific font families and typefaces to use too – and these had to be imported. Along with every single graphical element, which again needed be optimised. Being good at Photoshop and knowing how to code is very handy when building a master creative from scratch!
Bannerflow fact: The Bannerflow CMP originally began life creating and scaling flash ads – before migrating to HTML5. However, it was noted that designers struggled with HTML5. A lack of coding knowledge being a big issue. Therefore, when the platform become format agonistic, creating a builder tool that required no coding was a priority.
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Display ad production with a CMP Using a CMP’s ad builder tool eliminates the worst pain points of travel ad creation for designers. For one, there’s no need to individually code every HTML5 element, or copy and paste each function into a new banner size. Some CMPs, like Bannerflow, have a user interface so intuitive that anyone can use it to create complex HTML5 designs. Meaning designers can do what they do best which is design. But be warned! Some CMPs just offer template options limiting design and function. Another bonus with using a CMP is that your creatives are hosted in-platform, This makes it possible to edit and refine live banners, in real-time, without the need to re-publish them each time. Fall-back images are also created automatically. So no need to create GIF animations from a sequence of manually grabbed screenshots! From a designer’s viewpoint, the most beneficial aspect of using a CMP for travel ads is that it optimises every creative element in a banner automatically. All files are resized and optimised: with the use of font subsetting to the cropping of images. While polite loading means an advertiser can use high-res images – and video – without exceeding file size restrictions set by a publisher. What’s more, all your brand’s assets can be added to the banner builder tool: logos, fonts, everything you need to build your display advertising campaigns – saving massive amounts of time. Combine an ad builder tool with a scaling feature in a CMP and making all the different variations needed for a campaign can go from weeks to days, or even hours.
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Chapter 2 Mass-production of your travel ads More banners, more conversions Producing all the banners you need for a travel campaign is critical. What’s more, by 2020, global ad spending on mobile alone is set to reach $247.4 billion (Digiday). So being able to scale all your messages, from the smallest screen to the biggest is essential. Successful travel campaigns come in all different shapes and sizes too. While, programmatic creative, or dynamic creative optimisation (DCO), requires the creation of many more ad variations, which – if done manually – is a designer’s living nightmare!
Producing travel campaigns without a CMP Scaling a travel campaign without a CMP was a tedious and repetitive process. Once you had designed your master creative it became a matter of just copy, paste, repeat. For each new size in a banner set, every design element, from code to graphics, had to be individually copied and pasted into a newly labelled banner. Invariably tweaks and adjustments had to be made for the new sizes and the whole process took hours, even days, to complete. The more complicated the master banner, and the more devices you wished to serve an ad to, the longer it inevitably took. Next, even after producing all the different sizes and versions needed for different markets, fall-back images still remained. This involved screenshotting one still image for each frame of your banner ad. For a HTML5 banner campaign of 500 animations that might require 1500 screenshots. Entire banner sets also required optimising for different ad networks and publishers. Each with different banner size and weight requirements. All of which made manual scaling a difficult and tedious process.
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What’s more, the more repetitive manual tasks you endured, the more likely you were to make simple errors too. With hundreds of copies it became easy to use the wrong click-tags or forget them entirely. Imagine having to pull-down an entire campaign and double check all 500 tags because of one simple error!
Bannerflow fact: A bit of scary maths for you... Before using a CMP, each banner would take Jacobsson about 20 minutes to reproduce, times that by 500 and you have 10,000 minutes – or roughly one third of all the alloted time in an entire football season – per campaign. That’s even before you add 500 fall-back images to the equation!
Scaling ads with a creative management platform With a CMP, repetitive tasks are a thing of the past. It’s simply a matter of creating your master banner and the CMP takes it from there. Select your required size by ticking a box, make minor adjustments to the design, and continue to the next format. With unique algorithms, a CMP can use it’s smart scaling function to produce creative in seconds. In fact, the more banners you build, the easier the process becomes as the platform learns your preferences. Moreover, with easy scaling you can create variants of your adverts with little difficulty. You are no longer restricted to one image, copy, and layout for each campaign. Finally, the job of a designer is realised! They can get paid to do what they do best, which is design – not code, not copy and paste times infinity. Even better, a CMP automatically includes the click-tags when you publish to your chosen platform. Removing any margin for human error. In its entirety, the reproduction process can take minutes, not days.
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Chapter 3 Translating your ad campaigns Good translation management is essential Talking the language of your customers is a priority. Creating relevant campaigns that connect with viewers in their own language, or versions of ads tailored specifically for differing groups is part and parcel of travel marketing. At the heart of this process is streamlined translation management and access to talented multi-lingual copy editors. With some brands requiring up to 30 different banner variations per campaign, it is a complicated task to produce the necessary ads.
Translating travel campaigns without a CMP Translating an ad campaign for over 20 different languages was painstaking. Should a campaign run in more than one language, translators would be contracted by a production agency, or in-house translation manager. Everything would then be coordinated via a project manager via excel sheets and via email chains. A designer would then have to open each ad size, duplicate the file, and replace existing copy with new alternative copy from one of many complicated excel sheets. There was no way to coordinate translators in one place nor did they have direct communication with the designer. Each banner would have to be amended to fit the new copy; each small tweak and adjustment having the effect of adding hours to a designer’s workload. Additionally, a designer might have to totally rebuild all the ads associated with complicated languages ​​such as Finnish. Oh, and the translator would have no idea what the ad looked like either, so any contextual input would be completely lost. Leading to costly mistakes, rewrites, and further design tweaks. For a typical global travel campaign, the whole process could involve 10-20
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languages – lengthening an already complicated production process by weeks. Once the translated campaign was published that would be that. Returning to the ad, or updating the copy, just wasn’t worth the time and effort.
Bannerflow fact: Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen, freundschaftsbezeugung, rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften: some examples of lengthy German words. The production team at Bannerflow wasn’t that fond of some copy translations. We can’t understand why…
Translation management with a CMP Translation has been at the heart of the Bannerflow CMP from the very beginning. From its earliest iteration to today, easy translation management is a key component. With a cloud-based CMP, translations can be made within ads by translators, who also see their ad copy in all the chosen formats. They then work collaboratively with designers to edit, revise copy and other elements – with instant feedback. Messy spreadsheets and complicated workflows it is not. It’s now simple to translate ads into all the languages and variations you need. With built-in translation management, simply select a banner set and share it with your chosen in-house translators or translation agency. Plus, with automatic optimisation, repetitive design tasks are avoided. You simply add the translated copy to the master creative and the CMP automatically injects it into the entire banner set. And the cherry on top? A CMP allows for the easy optimisation of translated copy in live banner ads – no back and forth, no waiting, no need to republish. Refining complicated, multi-market campaigns is a given. The ultimate result: it’s possible to translate digital advertising in minutes instead of weeks.
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Chapter 4 Using rich media in travel advertising Innovative design in a competitive market Boring banners don’t convert. Amongst travel marketers, competition is high, and your brand needs to stand out. Rich media ads are one way of catching the eye of viewers. Interactive, animated, and innovatively designed display ads are weapons that all travel marketing teams must have at their disposal.
Creating rich media ads without a CMP Rich media was too complicated. If scaling banners and creating all the different variations needed for a basic campaign put heavy restrictions on creativity, then rich media banners added intricate coding requirements to the process too.
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Creating exciting digital display ads just wasn’t worth the time and energy. To code each design element required patience and knowledge. For advanced features, skilled HTML5 coders would need to step-in. Even worse, aggressive image compression was a necessary, but regrettable fact of life. And as such, superfluous design features were a luxury few could afford. Animations or complex interactive banners, for campaigns that spanned all of a brand’s markets were avoided. Sure, it was possible to produce rich media campaigns but scaling those campaigns in a realistic time-frame was impossible. Given all the factors required, only very few travel brands innovated with rich media.
Bannerflow fact: For some basic CMPs, templating solutions are seen as the way to go when creating rich media ads. But this has the effect of placing limits on designers. Instead Bannerflow developed widgets and in-built optimisations that freed creators and cemented our place in design Valhalla.
Producing rich media banners with a CMP The beauty of a CMP is that it makes creating HTML5 rich media ads routine. With the Bannerflow CMP, there are customisable widgets that do the heavy lifting. From graphic effects, to sign-up forms, to product galleries; these widgets reduce the process of adding HTML5 interactive features down to a simple drag and drop. Experiment with in-stream, outstream, and in-banner too. Reaching your audience with video display ads on any page, in any ad size, is particularly easy with in-banner video. Producing boring banners is now inexcusable – travel advertising has long moved on.
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Ultimately, improving campaign performance through stunning, interactive designs is easier than you think. And one more thing... with a CMP you can move beyond rich media and start to contemplate dynamic banners (more on this later‌). Rich media is just the start of the creative journey with a CMP. Creating exciting digital display ads just wasn’t worth the time and energy. To code each design element required patience and knowledge. For advanced features, skilled HTML5 coders would need to step-in. Even worse, aggressive image compression was a necessary, but regrettable fact of life. And as such, superfluous design features were a luxury few could afford. Animations or complex interactive banners, for campaigns that spanned all of a brand’s markets were avoided. Sure, it was possible to produce rich media campaigns but scaling those campaigns in a realistic time-frame was impossible. Given all the factors required, only very few travel brands innovated with rich media.
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Chapter 5 Collaborating on travel projects Optimising your workflows for better performance Collaboration is at the heart of all brilliant travel advertising. The simpler the workflows, the easier the communication between teams, the faster a campaign can be produced. It should be easy – but it’s unlikely that many campaigns ever meet these criteria. In fact, good collaboration and efficient workflows are rare. And it’s something that costs brands big time. Marketing managers are frustrated by stalled productions, designers sit on their hands, and data just isn’t ever used. There has to be a better way? Surely?
Team collaboration without a CMP Part of the the problem with collaboration – before the arrival of CMPs – was that it was the victim of endless email chains. Without the ability to comment, view, and approve in one place, there were completely separate processes for feedback and design. At no point in campaign production was there a stage where managers, marketers, and designers could easily share feedback. Display advertising worked in silos. It was slow and the opposite of agile working. For example, a designer would email a marketing manager a zip file with each individual ad. The marketing manager would then have the tedious task of opening each file one-by-one and individually commenting on each ad variation – before emailing this back as another attachment to the designer. Oh, and this would be for the first edit! The upshot of this exhausting and tedious process meant that communication was blunt and straight to the point. To the designer, on the receiving end of this feedback, it could seem dismissive and vague. It also meant banner designs were limited in potential.
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A world of constant feedback and optimisation was unimaginable to all members of the production team. Instead it was a tiring and tedious process hated by everyone.
Bannerflow fact: It was the delayed request: “500x500_spanish, move the CTA button left by 1 pixel” that finally broke the camel’s back for co-creator Jacobsson. Hence the creation of instant in-platform commenting and approval.
Team collaboration with a CMP Things are different with a CMP. Thanks to being cloud-based, collaboration between all team members takes place directly in a creative management platform. All processes are completely transparent, with no files sent – and all stakeholders involved. All advertising and creative material is accessible in one place. Thus everyone in a project sees everything, and comments in-platform; providing instant contextual feedback. The production process is efficient, workflows are improved, and there is no limit to travel campaign ambition. Designers are free to do what they do best and produce remarkable travel ads. While marketing managers can simply approve via a box tick. You can work globally, with colleagues anywhere, in any market too. Via a single preview link, all team members can view all the different sizes, languages, and versions of creatives. Teams become agile, and marketers can embrace the moment. Using a CMP means marketing teams act quicker across all production workflows – big or small. The ultimate end result is the death of long complicated email chains (at least in display advertising production).
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Chapter 6 Publishing your travel campaigns Publish with ease, everywhere Publishing campaigns should be simple. Easy publishing benefits all travel marketers. Not only does it improve campaign production and scheduling but it frees up resources and enables agile advertising practices. Programmatic buying should be quick – transactions occur in milliseconds. But from a human perspective, the process can be clunky and cumbersome. Until now...
How to publish display campaigns without a CMP Before the days of CMP integrations, publishing campaigns was a hassle. Each file would have to be manually uploaded – most likely by a designer. Ads would – again – have to be adapted to the ad specifications of the third parties involved. This could take days to load and test. This process involved uploading zip files to ad networks and publishers; it was repeated every time a campaign went live. And its impact was many unnecessary man-hours, with too many stakeholders. The result: what should have been a simple process, wasted time and budget. Plus, without the ability to amend post-publication – in real-time – any adjustments would require dismantling a campaign and re-uploading all over again. Publishing was once considered the final step of a campaign. Without realtime updating, there just wasn’t the option to tweak design, refine copy, or even A/B test. Optimisation of campaigns was unheard of. Along with it any hope of improving ad performance via reacting to events! If you managed to get a campaign live within a ‘reasonable’ time-frame that was achievement enough.
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Bannerflow fact: The sun and sea of Malta is the last place you want to waste hours correcting mistakes – frantically rebuilding, optimising, scaling and republishing. Yet, Daniel Jacobsson found himself in exactly that position, again and again.
How you publish campaigns with a CMP All takes is a few clicks. Yes, really it does. With a CMP, publishing networks are integrated into the platform. Rather than sending neverending zip files back-and-forth, the publishing process is done by one person, in one place, in one moment. How is this possible? All banners are hosted and accessible via a CMP; allowing marketing managers and designers to amend banners in real-time. Thanks to click tags, publishing becomes an almost ongoing process. Managers receive analytics data in minutes rather than weeks, meaning campaigns can be optimised on the fly. What’s more, optimising, and A/B testing isn’t something you learn about and never do, it’s something you do all the time. It’s ingrained in your campaigns. After all, if your brand isn’t doing it, you can sure bet your competitor will be.
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Part 2 Mastering your digital campaigns Taking travel advertising to the next level Is it possible for travel brands to take full control of their digital campaigns? And fulfil the promise of hyper-relevant adverts? With a enterprise-level creative management platform, the answer is a clear yes. Moving from simplifying complexity, to strategies previously unimaginable in digital marketing. The following four chapters explain how the features of a premium CMP can take travel brands to the next level. From innovative data driven designs across formats, to scheduling and optimising, all in real-time and performed in-house.
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Chapter 7 Using dynamic creative in your ads Hyper-relevant and engaging ads that convert Dynamic creative changes your perception of travel marketing. It really is presenting the right message, to the right person, at the right time. It’s digital advertising delivering on the promises travel brands’ have heard so many times over the years. Combined with developments in production and targeting, dynamic creative campaigns are rising in popularity. Yet, for some marketing teams applying dynamic creative to ads remains a distant possibility.
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Using data feeds in your banners without a CMP Before the advent of the premium CMP adding a feed to a banner set was difficult. Tech departments struggled to provide scalable options. Meaning creating banners that presented viewers with live data, such as up-to-date pricing, were generally avoided. Managing the data was not a simple task either. A travel brand wanting to use live data feeds would need high performance architecture to serve their feeds. For every impression pulled from the data feed, you needed the tech architecture to cope with one billion feed requests per month. Advertisers could certainly use a feed data but their servers couldn’t hope to supply the demand. What’s more, there were issues in how the data was presented in the banners too. For example, typefaces sometimes didn’t work because they were too large in file-size. Creating dynamic banners that contained rich media was also unthinkable. Interactivity or unique functionally added another layer of complexity that just couldn’t be feasibly scaled manually. Or if you attempted it, it would require far more development time than was satisfactory. The promise of even the smallest amount of live data was tantalising. There had to be a better way.
Bannerflow fact: Using the Bannerflow CMP you really do have unlimited options for what data you want to display – there really is no limit! However, be warned: with great power comes great responsibility!
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Producing dynamic creative campaigns with a CMP When it comes to connecting a data feed to your banners, rejoice! The days of designers hitting their collective heads on their shiny white desks are well and truly over. Stay fresh and personalised all the time and update in real-time. Serve live offers, the latest currencies; display whatever data you want – there’s no limit. Better yet, thanks to the unique capabilities of CMPs, in-house teams can automate responsiveness. How? By being able to turn off and on, the data being fed, controlling and selecting what is shown when, across banner sets. For example, an OTA company could connect their ads to a product feed, which during key holiday dates would retarget consumers. Showing specific viewers, the availability of products they’ve shown an interest in and their latest prices. Enterprise-level CMPs offer more tantalising options too. For example, you could integrate your data management platform (DMP) into your dynamic creatives. Or create personalised ads at scale that use customer journeys, demographics, or contextual prospecting. Presenting the right message, to the right person, at the right time is now nonfiction.
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Chapter 8 Landing Pages for all your travel ads Tailoring every aspect of your campaigns Producing an effective landing page isn’t rocket science. Yet, producing a bespoke landing page that works in harmony with your ad campaign is often overlooked. You may well have got a viewer to click-through via your dynamic banner but if they fail to convert then what’s the point? Mass-producing landing pages – as easily as you do display advertising – must be a priority for digital advertisers. What’s more, being able to optimise and update your landing pages is now essential. In the world of travel advertising, the days of a less-than-perfect landing page are over.
Creating landing pages without a builder tool In the recent past, it wasn’t easy to build the amount of landing pages needed for a campaign. To start with, you needed to craft each landing page individually. In practice this meant the number of landing pages built for a campaign was restricted by the time it took to build each page. With designers manually coding, and copy and pasting between documents, and programmes. With no easy way of mass-producing pages, travel marketers had to narrow their conversion opportunities. Indeed, research showed that the more landing pages you had the more likely you were to convert. (Still true!) The worst aspect of this way of building landing pages was the absolute lack of optimisation and testing. Campaigns were linking to landing pages that remained static and did not change. Why? Because it took to long update them. Added to this was the fact that not all landing pages built were responsive. Which isn’t ideal when you consider visitors from mobile devices leave after three seconds if a page fails to load or displayed incorrectly!
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Bannerflow fact: Moment marketing with your landing pages? Why the hell not. One travel client using Bannerflow was able to work agilely and produce all the landing pages they needed on the fly. Even including the latest dynamic prices as a data feed on the page!
Mass producing your landing pages with a CMP Landing page builders are another key feature of premium creative management platforms. With them travel marketers can build pages as easily as display ads. The landing page builders in some CMPs offer similar functionality to their banner builder cousins. In particular, they provide the same powerful smart scaling and versioning capabilities. Making the mass-production of landing page variations easy. Building your landing pages via a CMP also opens the doors to improved campaign performance and agile working. By being able to update in real-time and mass-version, digital marketers can use CMPs to A/B test and optimise – increasing conversions and sales. In addition, landing pages built via a premium CMP are compatible with tracking platforms. Oh, and one more thing: just like your banners, landing pages produced via a CMP are responsive by default. Meaning every device is an opportunity. After all beautiful landing pages are worthless if no one can see them! Plus, with trusted sub-domains, rerouting, and fall back options managing every aspect of your digital campaign in one platform is now the only way to work.
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Chapter 9 Scheduling your ads, for every occasion Planning your campaigns, 365 days in advance Scheduling, may be an unassuming element of digital marketing but it is crucial for successful travel campaigns. Being able to schedule in advance – and adjust to events – is essential for creating campaigns that connect with viewers. Integrated scheduling tools are the most effective way of handling your campaign from beginning to end. They are also key components of enterpriselevel CMPs.
The old way of scheduling Scheduling without a CMP was a time consuming process for travel marketers. Without a centralised and effective publishing application, scheduling in advance was impossible. After the arduous task of designing was completed, the act of scheduling a campaign was just as tedious. A marketing manager could have all his campaigns planned from January to December, but without the means of communicating this outside of long email chains then they might as well not have bothered. In fact, scheduling of old could hardly be called scheduling. Today, marketers constantly adapt and change campaigns to suit consumers and current events. But without an easily manoeuvrable scheduling application, marketers could only get their head above water long enough to look to the next campaign in front of them. With an inability to easily track where and when your ads were published, it was difficult to provide comparisons. If marketers wanted to compare an event–oriented campaign against standardardised banners it was incredibly difficult.
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Bannerflow fact: Scheduling is a fact of life for most social media marketers. Bannerflow asked the question: why the same couldn’t be true for display advertising? Coordinating campaigns across channels, catering to current events, and reacting to trending conversations – all are possible with an integrated scheduling tool.
Scheduling display advertising with a CMP A premium CMP will always offer a fully integrated scheduling tool. Today, travel marketing focuses relentlessly on being in the moment. The campaigns everybody are talking about are not just innovative, but relevant to consumers and current events. Scheduling with a CMP gives you the ability to select your banner ads within the same platform and schedule them in one place. Bypassing endless email chains and individual HTML file attachments. A/B testing is something that marketers of old could only dream of. With calendar style, drag and drop functionality, you can compare infinite numbers of campaigns against each other and keep track of them all in one place. With a CMP, scheduling doesn’t have to be a separate process that takes hours away from your workday – or even your holiday. In fact, using a CMP’s placeholder function, you can plan and automate publishing with specific start and end times.
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Chapter 10 Analytics and campaign optimisation Real-time insight and better return on investment How many times have articles, e–books, and research papers urged for greater optimisation? And how often have travel marketers and designers actually been able to do it? Sometimes what a CMO hears does not match the reality of how their marketing team works! The reality is that analytics and optimisation is a difficult process, especially without live reliable metrics and the tools to optimise. While too often it involves many different parties, with significant delay between publication and actionable results.
Ad analytics and optimising without a CMP Without a CMP, analysing and then optimising campaigns was a process that usually involved an agency. Which in itself wasn’t a bad thing but where the process fell down was in the time it took. The wait could be weeks between publishing a campaign and getting insightful data. At which point a marketing team would have probably already moved onto their next project. Ambitious marketing managers wanting to A/B test banner ads variants, couldn’t. A tedious design process and the inability to apply analytical data in real-time, meant that A/B testing wasted time and resources. Plus, you wouldn’t know the real ad performance until weeks afterward! Before premium CMPs, the type of data marketers would receive would be limited. Click-through rate, impressions, and clicks are all good measurements of success. Yet without live actionable data, digital marketers are unable to act with insight. In today’s marketing landscape, data is everything. You also want instant access to all available metrics to create effective campaigns that perform.
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The old way of working was a shot in the dark at best and offered marketers no way of improving their ad campaigns.
Bannerflow fact: A happy result of the analytics module in Bannerflow is the ability to identify bot traffic engaging with live banners. Bots cost the advertising industry big time! With the heatmap feature found in the Bannerflow CMP, it’s easy for marketers to identify patterns and discount false clicks. Having access to to your data is a major step in combating ad fraud (as well as designing better ads)!
Using analytics to optimise travels ads via a CMP Using a premium CMP to analyse and optimise your travel campaigns is a revelation. Marketers now have access to all campaign data in one place. Live metrics such as click-through rate, clicks, impressions, and even custom events such as video starts; all displayable through a single platform. Comparing different campaigns, versions, formats, domains, devices and languages can also be performed by selecting from a dropdown within a CMP. A/B testing is hassle free and doable in-house too. Any object within a banner is editable, and multiple versions can be quickly produced in the sizes required thanks to smart scaling. While, with real-time publishing, updates can go live across published ads instantly. Think a different CTA will improve your CTR? Give it a try. Then and observe its impact in real-time. For ad designers the shackles have come off! Plus, with a premium CMP heatmaps and conversion tracking allow you to identify problem areas in your adverts, as well as accelerate the success of performing campaigns. Particularly, useful for when standard figures aren’t enough for effective optimisation.
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Utilise demographic data from your partners and integrate it into your campaigns too. Use it to profile your audience and make even more relevant banners. Ultimately, creative management platforms make your in-house marketing strategies come to life.
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Part 3 Embracing the future of travel advertising Digital advertising is constantly evolving What next for travel brands? In the coming age of hyper-personalisation, using a creative management platform is one of the best technologies to leverage data and improve conversion rates. In the final three chapters we examine what the future has to offer for brands using enterprise-level CMPs. From mastery of your digital campaigns, to embracing the rapid emergence of new and tantalising opportunities. We discover how CMPs can create digital out-of-home campaigns and enable in-house DCO travel campaigns. Plus, why media buying becoming another key feature of the CMP.
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Chapter 11 Dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) Personalising your display campaigns with DCO Today personalisation of your ads is vital. Dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) is the ad tech that allows you to do so. DCO is the ideal pairing of data and creative – engineered to take advantage of geographic, demographic, and behavioural data to produce tailored ads for each viewer. DCO uses smart feeds – powered by insight – to produce messaging dependent upon who is seeing an ad. And being able to power your CMP-built ads with DCO is the perfect combination for travel marketers.
Producing personalised ads without a CMP Mass ad production is key to DCO. Without a creative management platform – or separate DCO solution – the time required to create each ad variant, with different copy, CTAs, or any other chosen element, would leave your marketing budget in ruins. For every desired variation, DCO requires new creative to work. This can often be as many as tens of hundreds of ads per campaign. If a team were to design, scale, and then constantly optimise each ad iteration via the “old way” of building a campaign it would never get published. Likewise, the cost of building that many banners would annihilate any return on investment (ROI) from a campaign. Indeed, while there are some static DCO solutions that could be used – they are far from ideal. These are reliant on coding, are less flexible in design, and far more difficult to optimise retrospectively – which makes their personalisation offering less effective. That’s not to say that advertising with a specific DCO solution isn’t without merit. But, put simply, display ads with hyper-personalisation are just far more effective – and easier to build – with a CMP.
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Bannerflow fact: In travel marketing, some brands become reliant on static and basic template driven designs when producing display campaigns. But with Bannerflow, you can create DCO variations that use all the features of the best rich media ads: from video to any number of interactive features.
Dynamic Creative Optimisation with a CMP DCO with an enterprise-level CMP is easy to implement if you are already using dynamic creative and use a data management platform (DMP). Remember, using first and third party data is essential for DCO! The design and scaling process is just as simple as before, and it’s easy to adjust creative and copy elements for all the variations you need.
Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) with a CMP
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7 1 A viewer who matches the target group of a campaign visits a website. A real-time auction begins of the website’s ad inventory. 2 The DSP of the ad campaign wins the impression with the highest bid. It then serves an ad tag, which belongs to the DCO ad campaign. 3 Next the DCO ad is requested by the viewer’s browser.
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4 Audience data from the DMP, along with a brand’s own performance insights then decide which dynamic message to show from the campaign feed. 5 Recommended messages are then injected in the ad. 6 These messages are collected via a CMP which populates dynamic text fields, buttons, images, videos and widgets on-the-fly inside the ad. 7 The viewer sees a personalised dynamically optimised ad.
Understanding Creative Management Platforms
Using a CMP you can set up campaign guidelines, enable data feeds, and the creative assets needed to make DCO happen. What’s more, if you’re already using platforms, such as Adform or Sizmek as alternative DCO serving solutions then inserting your CMP produced creatives should be just as easy. Where creative management platforms excel in DCO travel ad production, is in control, flexibility, and optimisation of creative design. They offer the same awesome versioning and rich media capabilities of the best HTML5 display campaigns – code-free – via DCO. Template free, dynamic creatives produced and controlled by a CMP offer the minimum requirement for sophisticated travel display campaigns. CMPs enable you to be more creative in your DCO approach. For example, you could use different banner designs for different target audiences, which aren’t variations of a template. Instead, you can use entirely different types of layout, design, or interactive elements for specific audience segments. There is no limit to your creative ambition.
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Chapter 12 Media Buying Acquiring the best programmatic ad inventory Media buying has progressed from humble beginnings: from inefficient person-to-person trading, to the extensive web of ad tech it is today. But within the midst of this vast network it can seem impossible to optimise the process and get the greatest return on your investment (ROI). Yet, a streamlined and efficient media buying process is within reach for travel marketing teams. Some creative management platforms now incorporate media buying tools. Meaning it is now possible to build, buy, publish and optimise all in one platform.
Media buying before a CMP Before the creative management platform it was not as if media buying was an impossible task. Technology had adapted quickly in this field and there were any number of demand side platforms (DSPs) that had stepped in to automate the process. But from an outsider’s perspective, the ad exchange network can be a mysterious and inaccessible place. Ad Exchange, SSP, DSP, RTB, DMP, and AMP: all are acronyms that emerged from this new system. And, which alienated a large proportion of marketers, who before, were very comfortable placing a call to advertise on a chosen publishing site. Even today, media buying should be a process that occurs in milliseconds. After all, it operates via algorithms, and should involve very little human engagement. But without oversight and true understanding of the process, this system does not reduce the mystery of digital advertising. In fact – in the wrong hands – it has only added another layer of complexity.
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With out the possibility to control media buying in-house, it was difficult to have accountability and understand where and how exactly your money was being spent. Transparent it was not.
Bannerflow fact: So called “black-boxing” via shady ad tech providers threatens the transparency of travel marketing. No more so, is this apparent than in the separatist nature of ad production, publishing, and media buying. It contradicts the simplified ideal of digital marketing. To counteract this, Bannerflow now provides in-house controls in both design and distribution. The team incorporated media buying into the platform and made previously complex processes open and accessible to all.
Media buying via a premium CMP A creative management platform that embraces every aspect of campaign production and publication allows marketers to easily optimise every stage of an online travel campaign. With full ownership over your media buying process it is easy to take control of where and what your travel ad spend is going on. Selecting different audiences, behaviours, locations, etc – can all now be done via a few clicks. You no longer need an agency to dictate how you spend your ad budget. With full control over ad spend you can analyse and optimise in realtime, in-platform. Moreover, with transparent reporting, travels marketers can see the true performance of ads across devices, browsers, domains, locations and more. Meaning that it’s possible to reallocate budget and optimise targeting on the go. Plus, you can fine tune parameters throughout the lifespan of a campaign via analytics.
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The days of handing over ad delivery to an outside agency are over. What’s more, some CMPs like Bannerflow, have no preference or obligations towards a specific SSP. This means you can wave goodbye to politics or business relations determining where it is you buy your inventory.
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Chapter 13 Digital out-of-home (DOOH) Expanding the horizons of your travel campaigns Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is nothing new. But digital out-of-home (DOOH) is set to explode in popularity. Look no further than British Airways’ impressive display ads in Piccadilly square back way in 2013 as evidence. The results are clearly there for the taking with DOOH. In fact, DOOH ads are twice as likely to be seen and are 2.5 times more impactful than static OOH ads according to a recent study in the UK. Integration with the rest your online advertising is a necessity .
Digital out-of-home without a CMP Without programmatic DOOH, agile marketing in OOH is difficult to implement. Minus the ability to control and publish campaigns from one platform, marketers were confronted with barriers similar to the “old way” of display advertising. What’s more, until the rise of new technologies, it was impossible to measure the performance of DOOH ads alongside other efforts. And as such, difficult to understand just what ROI you were getting from your OOH campaigns. Furthermore, in the age of hyper-relevant advertising, OOH seemed outdated and more in line with a ‘catch-all’ solution that few travel marketers were eager to pursue. Targeted OOH advertising was done with broad brushstrokes. However, while there has certainly been innovation in the DOOH space – with location and traffic data feeding into live ads – they were one-offs. Which was frustrating given that dynamic DOOH had the possibility to enable exciting and engaging ads as good as, if not better, than online ads. Lastly, the same tedious processes that hinder speedy production of display advertising, can also be true of DOOH ad creative – without a creative management platform that is…
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Bannerflow fact: From the beginning, the Bannerflow team’s vision was to create a format agnostic and intelligent CMP. And making the platform support the production of DOOH, video ads, and social was key. What’s more, as time as progressed, more and more travel marketing teams are now producing all their campaign materials in-house. And it’s certain that more formats will be added too.
Digital out-of-home with a CMP With a creative management platform, digital out-of-home ads can be built by a designer in-house – at the same time as the rest of a display campaign. Essentially, digital out-of home ads can quickly be scaled-up from the same master creative as a banner ad campaign. Meaning initial ad designs and campaign assets easily reused, without moving between tools.
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What’s more, travel-centric DOOH ads built using a CMP are as creative as your display ads. Without template restrictions, designers can experiment with different animations and elements – and just like display ads, add video, and other rich media widgets. Furthermore, with the ability to control campaign creatives in the same platform, travel marketers benefit from producing a truly omni-channel experience for customers. Thus, it is possible with moment marketing (and real-time publishing) to react next to the highway and on mobile! It’s also simple for marketers to create experiences using location data and dynamically feed data into DOOH travel ads. For example, you could show the latest flight prices outside the stadium for the next round of continental away match – minutes after a victory. Travel marketing teams, using an enterprise-level CMP, can produce customised DOOH ads for events, locations, and even particular times of day simply and efficiently. Thus, in-house travel marketers can be as specific as displaying ticket prices for that very same day, or hotel deals for the latest Game of Thrones location. Indeed, thanks to programmatic integration with the major OOH networks, and a code-free ad builder tool, adding real-time data to your OOH ads is as easy as your display ads.
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Conclusion
Mastering the future of travel advertising The travel industry has changed much since the first creative management platform. And as the needs of brands’ have become ever more complex, so the capabilities of CMPs have increased. Moreover, enterprise-level CMPs are now enabling marketing teams to challenge the status quo. Helping them to produce agency-level advertising in-house. From creative inception, to media buying – everything is now possible through one platform.
CMPs allow travel marketing teams to do more... And in the age of increasing competition amongst travel brands, being able to present the right ad, to the right viewer, at the right time is increasingly important. Digital advertising is no longer static, desktop banner ads but interactive, personalised and optimizable campaigns – that work across channels, and across markets. Creative management platforms are essential for in-house teams. And in an ever changing landscape, they offer the features and functions, for evermore efficient and sophisticated travel marketing.
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www.bannerflow.com