As typical social and search channels become overloaded and user fatigue grows, performance marketers have to focus on the best ad format for each channel and for the campaign overall. The current challenge for performance marketing teams is how to achieve total performance: the combination of scale, efficiency, and return on ad spend (ROAS).
To succeed at this total performance measurement, it’s important to consider the range of tools available. A painter doesn’t use only one brush, and a modern marketer can’t use only one ad format to fill in the full picture — no single creative format fits every stage of the funnel or every digital channel. With the right creative mix, ad campaigns can achieve high performance on the open web, meeting conversion goals and staying under budget.
The Performance Creative Mandate: Move Beyond Saturated Channels
The solution to marketing success isn’t the same as a decade ago: It’s too expensive and unpredictable to run ads on traditional channels now, and modern ads and better technology platforms offer many new ways to reach and engage audiences. Instead, performance marketers have to audit their current strategy and push toward accessing premium inventory in trusted environments, focusing on creative formats that capture attention and blend into existing user experiences.
Performance success depends on matching the right creative format to the right moment across a diverse publisher network. As performance marketing matures to meet new needs, platforms like Realize have emerged to tackle new challenges so that it’s possible to use multiple creative formats without starting from scratch or going over budget.
Here are five creative formats to attract new audiences at scale and improve ROAS.
The 5 Creative Formats Driving Total Performance
These creative formats each have their own uses and benefits as part of a broader total performance strategy. Get to know each of them and where they fit best in the funnel.
1. Motion Ads: Capturing Attention and Driving CVR
The unique benefit of motion ads is that they can bring static images to life and capture attention with short, dynamic creative. For example, the Realize platform allows users to transform static creative into GIFs or short looping videos, running without sound to subtly capture attention.
In a busy digital environment, motion ads are an important tool for marketers to deploy to meet conversion goals. They’re also useful in optimizing ROAS, with clients seeing 124% increase in ROAS over time with motion ads.
2. Vertical Ads: Scaling Mobile-First Social Assets
Vertical ads go hand-in-hand with the popularity of mobile devices for browsing and shopping. Using vertical ads, performance marketers can extend successful mobile campaigns beyond the walled gardens of social channels. They’re designed for maximal visual engagement.
Use vertical ads when you’re aiming for both scale and reach, targeting incremental audiences in premium environments. They also have the benefit of allowing you to reuse existing assets while maintaining brand consistency. When you’re using Realize, you get support for both vertical video and static vertical creative.
3. Carousel Ads: Showcasing Products and Driving Urgency
Carousel ads are a popular way for advertisers to feature multiple products, benefits, and offers in a single ad unit, helping to drive urgency. These multi-frame ads ensure high-impact creative, and they’re best used to drive conversions. Generally, and within Realize, carousels include individual cards that each have their own image, title, and landing page. They’re also interactive, asking users to swipe through images, such as to show off products or tell a brand story.
4. Display Ads: Providing High Visibility and Direct Access
Display ads are useful for extending campaign reach beyond native formats. They perform consistently across premium environments, offering a high-visibility, efficient option for performance marketers. Use these ads for both reach and consideration, keeping in mind that they use direct publisher supply that ensures better supply path efficiencies.
Display ads are also a creative type within Realize, designed to extend reach beyond the feed. They offer flexibility in creative options, running on standard IAB formats with cost per click (CPC) pricing. Realize users can also upload or import existing top-performing social creatives for repurposing into display ads, saving a lot of time and resources.
5. Native Ads: Offering Seamless Engagement and High CTR
Native ads are ideal for a seamless user experience, as they use images and titles styled to blend in naturally with publisher content. Native ads are best used for driving authentic engagement and high click-through rates.
Use native ads when your goal is consideration as well as traffic quality, and when you’re looking to strengthen audience connections. They work well in an always-on approach to achieve both reach and engagement.
Key Takeaways
Each business and marketing team has to choose the right combination of formats for their audience and goals, keeping in mind that total performance success these days is multi-format. Make sure your creative playbook is flexible and diverse, and choose a platform that supports these formats. Performance marketing platforms like Realize are specifically designed to cut through the challenges of user fatigue and overused channels, and they incorporate AI so marketers can optimize for conversions and get the most out of ad spend.
Try an initial audit of your creative strategy to see where you can embrace format diversity. Get started here with help from Realize.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How can I manage and test five different creative formats efficiently without overwhelming my team?
Marketing teams can learn a lot and build better campaigns from testing these five creative ad formats, with results like better ROAS and improved conversions. At a minimum, performance marketers should standardize testing processes, use templates, and establish data-driven workflows.
Start with hypotheses about your audience, then uplevel or repurpose existing assets into the five creative formats. From there, see what works and pivot quickly to optimize the ad format mix. Getting help from a technology platform is the easiest way to manage and test formats without overwhelming your marketing team, especially a lean team that has to stay within strict budget limits and may not be able to rely on design support. Technology platforms streamline asset transformation and deployment and offer internal tools, plus AI capabilities that can save a ton of time. For example, Realize’s AdMaker feature uses specifically trained gen AI to create and optimize static and motion ads within the platform.
Since these formats run on the open web, how is brand safety guaranteed across diverse publisher sites?
Open-web formats run across diverse publisher sites, and manual management is incredibly time-consuming and often risky. Modern performance advertising platforms need to understand requirements like brand safety and suitability. This requires direct publisher integrations, not just exchanges, along with robust control tools.
Look for platforms like Realize, which offer verified inventory free of Made for Advertising (MFA) sites, which can damage brand reputation with their low-quality, money-first approach. Within Realize, integrations with third-party verification partners also ensure that marketers are complying with safety, privacy, and ad quality standards with features like pre-bid filtering, keyword blocking, and customizable allow/block site lists. There are also built-in fraud and privacy protections, along with GDPR support. In addition, contextual targeting analyzes content and metadata on publisher sites to ensure safe placements.
Can my performance AI effectively optimize campaigns when running native, motion, and display ads simultaneously?
Yes, it’s possible for performance AI to optimize campaigns while running native, motion, and display ads simultaneously. The performance AI has to be format-agnostic, solely focused on advertiser outcomes. Successful capabilities and platforms use real-time conversion data captured by implementing a pixel on the site. They can then adjust bids across formats and environments so spend is directed toward the highest value impressions, no matter the ad type. With these abilities, you can optimize campaigns as you go, avoiding wasted budget and getting impactful results. Performance AI, like that in Realize, also helps to qualify prospective audiences through engagement signals.
