Dynamic Banner Ads: How DCO & Creative Versioning Work at Scale

Display campaigns rarely stay simple for long. A single creative concept can quickly turn into dozens, hundreds or even thousands of individual assets once different banner sizes, products, audiences, languages, offers and markets are taken into account.

Producing every variation individually is possible, but it isn’t always an efficient way to run a large display campaign. This is where dynamic banner ads, creative versioning and Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) become useful.

Rather than treating every banner as a completely separate piece of creative, dynamic production allows campaigns to be built around a flexible creative framework. Elements such as imagery, headlines, products, pricing and calls to action can then change according to predefined rules, data feeds or audience signals.

The result is a display campaign that can deliver significantly more creative variation without requiring every possible combination to be manually designed and built from scratch.

What are dynamic banner ads?

A dynamic banner ad is a display ad in which one or more elements of the creative can change without requiring a completely separate banner to be built for every variation.

The overall design and structure of the banner may remain consistent, while individual elements such as the headline, product image, price, offer or CTA are populated dynamically.

For example, a retailer could create one core HTML5 banner framework capable of displaying different products. Instead of manually creating 100 individual banners for 100 products, the creative can connect to a structured product feed containing the relevant imagery, product names, pricing and destination URLs.

The banner framework provides the visual system; the data determines what appears within it.

Dynamic creative can also respond to contextual or audience information. Google documents dynamic creatives in Campaign Manager 360 as creatives that can change according to rules using signals including country codes, keywords, ad IDs and custom key-value pairs.

That makes dynamic banners particularly useful for campaigns involving large product catalogues, multiple locations, localisation, changing offers or numerous audience segments.

What is Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO)?

Dynamic Creative Optimisation, usually shortened to DCO, is a form of programmatic creative that automatically builds or selects different versions of an advertisement using data and predefined creative components.

Amazon Ads describes DCO as technology that creates multiple iterations from the same base creative while tailoring parts of the advertisement according to audience, context and performance information.

A typical DCO campaign might contain a library of:

• headlines
• product images
• background images
• prices
• offers
• calls to action
• logos
• colours
• location information

These elements aren’t simply thrown together at random. The campaign has rules determining which combinations should appear and under what circumstances.

A travel company, for example, could show different destinations depending on the user’s location. A retailer could display products someone has previously viewed. A national business could automatically show the nearest branch. An international advertiser could serve different languages or offers in different markets.

This allows one creative system to support many different advertising experiences.

Dynamic banners and DCO aren’t quite the same thing

The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but there is a useful distinction.

A dynamic banner simply contains creative elements capable of changing. Those changes might be driven by a feed, predefined rules or another data source.

DCO goes further by using data and optimisation logic to determine which creative variation should be delivered.

You can therefore have dynamic creative without necessarily running a sophisticated DCO strategy.

There’s also a third concept worth separating from both: creative versioning.

Creative versioning involves efficiently producing predetermined variants of a campaign. A brand might need the same campaign across five sizes, four languages and six promotional messages. Those assets can be generated from a common creative system without necessarily changing dynamically at impression level.

For large campaigns, dynamic creative, DCO and creative versioning can all form part of the same production workflow.

What parts of a banner can be dynamic?

Almost any element that has been considered properly during creative production can potentially become dynamic.

The important part is designing for variation from the beginning.

A headline containing three words and one containing fifteen words can’t necessarily occupy the same space without affecting the design. Product images may have different proportions. Prices can have different lengths between currencies. German localisation may require considerably more space than the equivalent English copy.

Amazon specifically recommends considering these variables while the DCO template is being designed, including how changing product names, CTAs, images, layouts, typography and colour schemes will behave within the creative.

Good dynamic production therefore isn’t simply a technical exercise. The creative has to be designed to accommodate change.

How does dynamic banner production work?

Although the exact workflow depends on the advertising platform, most dynamic campaigns follow a similar process.

1. Establish the campaign variables

First, determine what actually needs to change.

If every audience receives the same creative, building a dynamic system may add unnecessary complexity. But if the campaign contains hundreds of products, locations, languages or audience-specific messages, the benefits become much clearer.

The production team should identify the variable elements before development begins.

2. Build the master creative

A flexible master is designed around those variables.

Rather than creating one finished advertisement, the master effectively becomes a creative framework containing rules for how different content should behave.

This is where experience with HTML5 display ad production becomes important. Animation, typography, image positioning, responsive behaviour and platform restrictions still need to work regardless of which content is loaded.

3. Create the content feed or variation set

The variable content then needs a structured source.

Depending on the campaign, this might include:

Product ID | Headline | Image | Price | CTA | URL | Audience | Market

Google’s Studio documentation describes dynamic creatives as consisting of the creative assets plus a Studio profile containing rules and, where required, a dynamic feed containing the possible content variations.

Adform uses a similar principle: its dynamic ads can use a base creative together with versioning data to change image, video and text according to audiences, context and performance.

4. Apply targeting or decision rules

Next comes the logic controlling which content appears.

That might be as simple as:

UK → English creative
France → French creative
Germany → German creative

Or considerably more sophisticated:

London + warm weather + existing customer → Product A + summer image + loyalty offer

The exact capabilities depend on the platform, campaign data and media setup.

5. QA the combinations

This is one of the most important stages.

It’s not enough for the default banner to look correct. The creative system needs to cope with the realistic extremes contained within the campaign.

That means checking things such as:

long headlines
short headlines
large prices
missing values
different currencies
different image proportions
multiple languages
CTA variations
different banner dimensions

The objective is to find combinations capable of breaking the design before the campaign goes live.

6. Publish and optimise

Once the campaign is live, performance data can inform which creative combinations continue to be served or prioritised.

Google’s documented dynamic workflow similarly runs from choosing a strategy and creating the feed/profile through previewing, publishing, QA, trafficking and then reporting and updating dynamic content after launch.

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Dynamic banner ads vs static banner ads

Dynamic creative isn’t automatically the correct answer for every campaign.

A straightforward brand campaign containing a handful of messages and standard sizes may be quicker and cheaper to produce as conventional static or animated display ads.

Dynamic production becomes increasingly valuable as the number of potential variations grows.

It’s therefore less about dynamic being better than static and more about choosing the right production method for the scale and complexity of the campaign.

What is creative versioning?

Creative versioning is the process of taking an approved master concept and systematically producing the different assets required for a campaign.

Imagine an international campaign requiring:

8 banner sizes × 6 languages × 4 messages × 3 product variations.

That’s potentially 576 creative combinations.

Producing each asset independently would create an enormous amount of repetitive production work and increase the possibility of inconsistencies.

A structured versioning workflow allows the core design and animation logic to remain consistent while approved content is changed systematically.

This is particularly useful for brands and agencies running large campaign rollouts where the creative concept is already established and the challenge is production at scale.

That’s also an important distinction in Banner Squad’s role: we aren’t necessarily replacing the creative agency developing the campaign concept. We can take an approved creative direction and turn it into the hundreds of production-ready assets required to actually run it.

When does DCO make sense?

DCO becomes particularly useful when relevance and scale occur at the same time.

Common applications include ecommerce catalogues, automotive ranges, travel destinations, property listings, betting and sports data, financial products, international campaigns and multi-location businesses.

An ecommerce advertiser might dynamically display products previously viewed by a customer. A car manufacturer could vary the model and finance offer. A travel brand could combine departure airport, destination and current pricing. A retailer could show the nearest store.

It can also be contextual rather than personal.

Dynamic DOOH campaigns, for example, can change creative according to factors such as weather, location or live events. Displayce documents examples including changing products according to temperature and updating creative according to real-time environmental information.

The common theme is the same:

the campaign contains a variable that is useful enough to justify changing the creative.

Which platforms support dynamic creative?

The implementation differs between platforms, which is why production requirements should be established before development starts.

Google’s Studio dynamic creative workflow integrates with Campaign Manager 360, using creative assets, profiles, rules and dynamic feeds.

Banner Squad also produces campaigns for platforms including Display & Video 360, Campaign Manager 360 and Adform.

Adform has its own DCO capabilities for dynamic ads and product retargeting, including feed-based approaches to changing creative content.

The key is not assuming one dynamic build can simply be uploaded everywhere unchanged. Platform specifications, feeds, tracking and trafficking requirements need to be considered as part of production.

How should dynamic HTML5 banners be tested?

Dynamic campaigns create an interesting QA problem: there may be far too many possible combinations to inspect every one manually.

Testing therefore needs to happen at several levels.

First, the underlying HTML5 creative should meet the technical requirements of the destination platform. Banner Squad’s HTML5 Banner Validator can help identify common technical issues before trafficking.

Next, the creative framework should be tested across browsers, devices and relevant environments.

Finally, representative content combinations should deliberately test the extremes of the system — longest copy, shortest copy, unusual images, different currencies and any localisation likely to alter the layout.

The objective isn’t simply to prove that one banner works. It’s to demonstrate that the system producing the banners is robust.

Dynamic creative makes production a system

The real advantage of dynamic banner production isn’t that a banner can display a different headline.

It’s that a campaign can move from producing individual files to building a controlled creative system.

For brands and agencies running increasingly complex campaigns, that distinction matters. More audiences, markets, products and messages no longer have to result in the same proportional increase in manual production.

The creative idea remains important. Dynamic production simply provides a more scalable way of turning that idea into all the advertising variations required to run the campaign.