Dynamic Video Ads - Get the most out of your PPC bucks

Dynamic Video Ads: An Overview

Let’s take a look at dynamic video ads in general and how they’re displayed to users.

The main thing about this type of video ad is the personalized content. This content is automatically customized to suit the demographics, individual interests, and behaviors of the users.

As you're probably already aware, paid social media ads are the most common form of advertising with dynamic video ads. Based on what social media they are displayed on, we can divide dynamic videos for social media into:

• Instagram Dynamic Video Ads
• Snapchat Dynamic Video Ads
• Pinterest Dynamic Video Ads
• LinkedIn Dynamic Video Ads
• YouTube Dynamic Video Ads and
• TikTok Dynamic Showcase Ads

Advantages Of Dynamic Video Ads

So why would anyone use dynamic video ads in their campaign? There are a few major reasons.

For ad content today, a one-size-fits-all solution arguably isn’t the best way to go. In 2024, ad fatigue is a serious problem for creative strategies. The users are better at avoiding ads and are much more selective about what ads they choose to click on and why.

There’s also a studied phenomenon by the name of banner blindness. Reportedly, people’s attention on the internet is much more selective than before. Even if they are relevant ads, many users will deliberately ignore anything that looks or feels like an ad.

You have probably noticed this in yourself too. However, this is only partially true. When animation and video come into play, it is much harder to ignore an ad’s presence, and dynamic video ads provide one of the best cures for the banner blindness problem.

Dynamic video advertising solves the problem of dullness by not being static — but engaging instead. At the same time, these types of ads offer specific content relevant to a particular person, effectively providing a much better value both for the advertiser and for the user.

Dynamic Static Ads VS Dynamic Video Ads

Since there isn’t really that much info online on dynamic video ads, you might be led astray to research Dynamic Static Ads. Dynamic video ads and static ads are very different and show different results.

Dynamic static ads still offer you the ability to change certain elements depending on different variables but are much less engaging. Dynamic static ads include graphics that promote your brand and also consist of photos/images with text. Sometimes, they can also feature a simple animation.

There are, of course, many benefits to dynamic photo ads. They are a great option for e-commerce & retail (prices and discounts can be updated dynamically, etc). They can also be a great option if you’re just starting out with dynamic advertising, as a first step, so you can “test the waters” and create one of these before getting into dynamic video advertising.

However, dynamic video ads offer a whole new world of engagement. It is widely known that video has always been far more engaging and that it offers a far superior ROI. Of course, that’s the main reason why video ads are more expensive. Video offers a much more engaging advertising experience and brings a better CTR and much higher conversion rates. Highly relevant video ads are proven to capture attention and stop us from scrolling.

Videos simply grab us instantaneously. This fact, combined with dynamic video characteristics, just elevates all of this relevance to another level.

Creating Dynamic Video Ads

In this article, we’ll put our main focus on making your ideas come to life. It’s important to note here that researching your audience, having your campaign planned out, defining your campaign's goals, and having a well-defined ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) are all necessary prerequisites to getting started with dynamic video advertising.

Only after completing these important high-level steps, can you focus on the execution. That’s where this article comes in to help.

Now let’s get practical and take a look at some of the tools you can use to actualize your next campaign idea and get your message across.

Best Tools For Dynamic Creative Campaigns

One of the most frequently asked questions is: How do I create video ad content at such a big scale? The truth is, most advertisers rely on automation to create thousands of personalized ads for social media.

We’ve put together a short list of some of the most popular dynamic video solutions on the market, so you can get started with dynamic creative ads today by comparing them and how they relate to your marketing needs.

Celtra

Celtra is one of the synonyms for dynamic creatives in the industry.

Celtra allows its users to create and test multiple dynamic creatives, as well as adjust them, tweak them, and go live directly to social media, all through their intuitive platform. Celtra also puts a big emphasis on travel ads, which are notoriously difficult to set up in a dynamic campaign. Many different destinations, landmarks, seasons, discounts, accommodation availability, and other elements that need to be set up to change dynamically all the time, make it a fairly difficult task.

Celtra is also extremely applicable for e-commerce users who are looking to promote products whose availability, discounts, prices, and other important elements vary on a weekly or even daily basis.

Even though the main solutions Celtra offers are dynamic static ads for social media, it also offers the possibility to include video in your campaign, because they recognize the undisputable value of video content in marketing. They offer video assets and presets for concrete niches and an end-to-end workflow to review your video and image DPAs.

Their platform is self-serve and offers a fully automated production for the users.

There are however some minor flaws that certain users point out, such as an absence of bulk editing options (which can be a big downside depending on the number of necessary ad variations), and a somewhat slow response time of the customer support.

Apart from these minor setbacks, Celtra is still a very strong contender in the market as an invaluable tool for creating dynamic campaigns on a large scale.

Hunch

Hunch is an industry-leading dynamic creative tool that combines AI & automation in its services. This tool serves to help marketers automate their creative ad production and create many ad different variations that change dynamically depending on weather, language, the city they are displayed in, and many other variables.

Hunch puts its main focus on dynamic static ads for social media. Their creative studio offers many modern templates and also offers you full control and the ability to design banners from scratch, along with custom fonts, vector support, and Photoshop document upload.

The biggest part of Huch is providing dynamic creative solutions, but their service also includes a content management platform, with valuable data insights to its users, and any necessary retargeting is made easy. Users can localize their campaign through Hunch’s API, and target specific audiences in particular regions through their platform, based on the insights they gain from the platform itself, so it’s an extremely useful all-in-one dynamic campaign tool.

Hunch is useful both for creative automation and campaign management. However, you can’t have one without the other — it’s a complete package, and the users track their campaigns from a single centralized spreadsheet where you can constantly improve your creative, complete with real-time metrics and user data.

Hunch offers good customer support, and the very few downsides that only certain users have pointed out are that the “UX could be more intuitive” and that for some, this tool has a “limited ability to monitor, edit, and optimize” campaigns through the app itself.

However, despite these minor flaws that few have pointed out, Hunch is arguably one of the industry leaders in dynamic static ads for social media.

Plainly

Plainly is a versatile and powerful tool primarily specialized in rendering hundreds or thousands of video variations with dynamically changing elements.

Plainly offers batch-rendering solutions for all kinds of industries: from publishers and creative agencies to real estate and tech companies, and many others.

This is the go-to platform for all types of videos with dynamically changing elements, which, most often, need to be rendered at a large scale as well. Plainly offers a very quick and very reliable service, with a great customer support team.

Unlike other tools, with Plainly, you don’t need to have an active social media campaign to create your dynamic video content.

Plainly’s dynamic videos are created through a template that you design yourself in Adobe After Effects, an industry-standard video-making tool that a ton of creative teams use for creating dynamic content.

Whether you have tons of experience or are just starting out with dynamic video advertising, Plainly can help you achieve your dynamic video goals probably a lot quicker than you ever thought possible.

Depending on your needs, a lack of a centralized campaign tracking option might be a downside. However, when it comes to generating dynamic video ads and hundreds or thousands of video variations, Plainly is one of the best choices on the market, offering you complete control as well as automatic distribution of the videos to Slack, Dropbox, YouTube, Vimeo, and Google Drive.

Creating Dynamic Video Ads Using Plainly

Plainly offers one of the easiest workflows to create hundreds or even thousands of video variations that change dynamically, based on your preferences.

Here’s a step-by-step workflow of how you can set up Plainly for this:

1. Create A Template — this is a "base creative video", created in After Effects, and serves as a template for all other video variations
2. Set Up Plainly — you upload the template to Plainly and select what elements get changed with every render — each variation is another video
3. Set Up The Integration — using Plainly's API or native integrations, you create the automated video creation workflow as well as the automated distribution of the videos

And just like that — your video campaign is ready.

Here’s an example of just how easy it is to create 50 different video variations with dynamically changing elements, through Plainly. The rendering process for these 50 videos took just one minute.

You can set up a workflow similar to this on a smaller or larger scale, just as easily, and apply it to your specific dynamic video campaign in no time.

Dynamic Video Ad Examples

Now let’s take a look at a couple of different dynamic video ad campaigns and how they were used creatively to bring high conversion rates to different companies.

Axe’s Romeo Reboot Campaign

This is one of the very rare live-action examples of dynamic video ad campaigns. Axe’s campaign in Brazil featured a dynamic video with 100,000 possible variations, depending on a user’s interests. Amazing.

Music and even the genre of the movie changed, with further personalization based on the viewer interaction. The campaign was a complete success.

Now let’s take a look at the next two examples and see just how versatile dynamic video can be. Hint: it doesn’t need to be limited just to social media!

New South Wales University’s Personalized Video Campaign

This is an interesting example of using dynamic video content to increase engagement. This personalized video campaign was sent to successful University applicants to congratulate them on getting into their desired program.

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As you can see above, the video has text and voice-over elements that change dynamically, so they are personalized for each student by name. Smart Video Australia was behind this campaign. Although a little clunky in certain parts, its results speak for itself. Smart Video Australia cites ‘watch rates’ as 3.5 times higher than for regular video, and 52% more e-mail opens with “personalized video” in the subject line.

Plainly’s Dynamic Video Campaigns

Now let’s take a look at dynamic video campaigns that were done through Plainly, and how they achieved fantastic results for Plainly’s clients.

Anywhere Real Estate’s Personalized TVCs

Anywhere is a large real estate services company, and home to some of the most recognized names, as well as the largest franchisor of residential real estate brands in the world.

Anywhere approached Plainly to help them with creating a workflow that will enable Anywhere to personalize several hundred videos for their franchisees  — with as little manual work as possible.

Anywhere creates a plethora of marketing materials for their franchisees — which are all different brands. In this case, instead of using a one-size-fits-all ad for a new marketing campaign, they integrated opportunities for customization — making it relevant to each franchisee’s local market.

The dynamic elements included the company name, URL, and location.

Here’s an example video:

And here’s a localized version, with differing elements:

After creating the template in Plainly and choosing the dynamic elements, instead of spending 15-30 minutes per video, their team was able to render hundreds of videos in a matter of minutes. Needless to say, they were more than impressed.

Since deployment, this campaign has garnered more than 1,100+ downloads of the customized content.

With the help of Plainly, Anywhere was able to export hundreds of videos in a matter of minutes.

Also, thanks to this project, Anywhere now has a scalable setup that can be used when they have a similar campaign. This is exactly why Plainly was created: to help people skip the manual, boring parts and focus on the bigger, more creative parts of any project.

Augment Agency’s 5k Personalized Videos

Augment Agency worked with a company that owns a large number of races all over the world, including marathons half marathons 5ks, etc.

They approached Plainly because they needed help to create over 5,000+ personalized videos for the runners who participated in their client’s Run Malibu race.

With Plainly’s help, Augment Agency was able to get off to a running start with Plainly and create over 5,000 personalized videos for their runners, in time. The 5k videos were created from scratch in about two weeks.

The contestants loved these videos and shared them all over their social media. The runners were thanked for participating through an email campaign, with a wholesome piece of content and received a nice little memory.

Augment Agency managed to communicate their client’s values, which are centered on showcasing the power residing in each of the runners, and the personalized videos were a great way to communicate just that. Talk about redefining the purpose of dynamic video ad campaigns.

Undisclosed Record Label’s Major CPC Boost

By combining stock videos, their own audio tracks, and copywriting, this Record Label used to create TikTok ads that were converting pretty well. However, the CPC on TikTok ads goes up pretty fast, especially if you don’t put out fresh creatives. This is why this Record Label decided to try something different to optimize its CPC.

This Record Label had two use cases with Plainly:

The first use case was video ad automation. The Record Label created the AE template and chose the dynamic elements through Plainly. They also created individual copies of the ads themselves. They included videos from Unsplash as well as the music. This made the videos ready to render with Plainly.

Plainly then generated the video automatically for TikTok and Instagram. The video for Instagram had a slight variation (e.g. different font). This way, the video was recognized as native to this platform.

The Record Label’s second use case was creating ad variations:

The client created three separate folders labeled Images, Audios, and Videos on Dropbox. Thanks to the Zapier integration, Plainly was able to access this folder, and randomly combine audio tracks with the videos, to render completely new creative material, both for Instagram and TikTok.

By using Plainly, this Record Label was able to:

• Generate around 30 original videos per day with minimum effort
• Significantly decrease CPC on TikTok
• Kill two birds with one stone by simultaneously creating videos for TikTok and Instagram, and taking into account the specificities of both platforms

You can read more about the specifics of this campaign here.

Main Takeaways

The benefits of dynamic video ads should be abundantly clear by now. Their engaging nature surpasses all other digital ad experiences by miles. When we connect that characteristic to high conversion rates of video as a format, you get an amazingly powerful weapon to showcase your creative ad ideas, generate high conversion rates, and get a high return on investment.

With tools available today, it’s easier than ever before to serve relevant campaigns, as well as thousands of video variations with elements that change dynamically — in just a few days, and in a completely scalable way, across all channels.

No more reasons to wait around, get to it! Personalize your videos. Complete the high-level stuff, write your ideas down, and watch your campaign bring in new customers more quickly than ever before. Good luck!