Intersect Digital Case Study: Ford Tier II Dynamic Strategy All agencies with automotive clients must navigate the churn of Tier II production. To deliver users up-to-the-minute offers and pricing but avoid serving antiseptic creative, they must use a dynamic system like DoubleClick’s Dynamic Ads. Intersect partnered with Ford’s AOR Team Detroit to migrate the entire Ford Tier II serving strategy to run through DoubleClick and helped build what members of the DC team described as the most complex structure of dynamic feeds they’ve seen attempted.

136,000 Banner Templates? Dynamic content’s elephant in the room is the matter of deferred effort. The more elements that are made dynamic, the more work the feed managers will have setting up each instance. A typical dynamic ad has 5-10 variables, but to be truly targeted across zip, vehicle, campaign, messaging, and offer, the Ford Tier II banners needed a combination of four Google feed sheets, each with upwards of 50 variables. One of the strategies we employed to attenuate that effort was to compartmentalize portions of the base templates. Rather than building overwhelmingly dynamic templates that would require a huge amount of content management—or, conversely, creating a mass of templates that were too specific—we developed templates that intelligently load other sub-templates. This made the production of the required 7500 unique templates manageable. The total number of vehicle/creative/size deliverables was 136,000, and, naturally, all of those deliverables had basically an infinite number of possible permutations when populated by the feed and trafficked.

Componentizing Intersect’s approach was to make the process of creating new templates as fast as possible. Like the Rich Media APIs of DoubleClick, Flashtalking, and PointRoll, we built component-driven libraries that shorten future development time.

Forward Thinking The most valuable aspect of our Dynamic API approach was our intuitive Extra_Data component, a catch-all field value which allowed individual creative to override just about every aspect of a template and fine-tune any placement. Without knowing the exact creative that future dynamic ads may require, we allowed the feed structure to remain intact while still supporting new ideas in the dynamic system.