Putting creative firepower back in the hands of publishers (with Clipcentric’s Colleen Tully)

The digital advertising world isn’t exactly basking in calm waters right now. Reorgs, leaner teams, and a never-ending demand for new ad formats, more personalization, and higher performance have left AdOps and Creative teams firefighting. As everyone scrambles to deliver “what’s next,” the gap between creative ambition and available resources only widens.

That’s the tension Clipcentric set out to dismantle with its latest platform evolution - a suite designed to put premium, personalized creative back in publishers’ hands across web, mobile, and CTV. Rob sat down with Colleen Tully, Sr. Director of Sales Accounts, to dig into how this new update is helping publishers deliver better ads faster - without rebuilding their ad engineering teams.

Rob: Many publishers are under pressure to deliver fresh ad experiences faster than ever. What specific challenges did you design this refresh to solve - for creative and Ad Ops teams?

Colleen: With reorgs and staffing cuts hitting the industry hard, a lot of publishers have lost their ad engineering resources while the creative team has dwindled. This can make them hesitant to bring newer, more premium units to market. In our latest refresh, we’ve tightly integrated tools that teams already use - whether it’s Photoshop for layer-based creative editing, or Excel for data and tag exporting - so that building out impactful creative is an easy lift.

Rob: The new dashboard puts personalization front and center. How does that change the way teams manage campaigns day-to-day?

Colleen: It shows you exactly what you need, no matter your role. All submitted campaigns, live campaigns, reporting - it’s easily accessible so that teams stay in sync. Whether you’re in Ad Ops, Account Management or Creative, you’re all looking at the same, real-time information, presented in the way you need it.

Rob: The update includes new creative tools like AI-powered image generation and gamification. What’s driving that demand for more interactive, dynamic formats right now, and what kinds of results are publishers seeing?

Colleen: Ad creative must be engaging to drive brand awareness, and games are a powerful way to pull users in - especially now they’re used to seeing them across multiple platforms. Our new features make it easy to build ads with games like mazes, catch-and-avoid, or hitting a target. The mechanism for each game is in place via our pre-built widgets, so there’s no longer a heavy lift for fully custom executions. Designers can then get creative with how they use these - whether catching donuts in a Dunkin’ box, lining up a putt for a birdie, or navigating a maze to reach a coupon code, they only need to worry about the design, not how to make the game work inside the container.

The new AI-powered image generation tools reduce the time needed to optimize assets for different ad formats. Designers can take existing creatives from a 300x250 and quickly repurpose them for a leaderboard, for example.

Rob: You mention advanced data feed integrations that let publishers serve thousands of ad variants off a single tag. What does that unlock for performance or personalization at scale?

Colleen: Scale has historically been a barrier to personalization in ads, but our ability to integrate data feeds from both publishers and advertisers makes it easy to dynamically change ad creative in real time from a single tag, and then deliver reporting metrics based on every variant served. We can alter creative at run-time based on factors like browser language, geolocation or current weather. We recently had a client run a campaign with 10,000+ variants from one tag.

And for publishers with first-party data, leveraging that directly in the creative unit makes ads far more engaging. A sports publisher could dynamically change an ad based on the user’s fantasy team stats, or a fitness publication could feature an ad for a retailer with different sports equipment based on the user’s primary activity.

Where it gets really powerful is combining publisher and advertiser data. We can connect to data feeds through APIs and have multiple feeds within a unit. Recently we had a publisher run a campaign that included its own real-time data from a live sporting event paired with an advertiser’s data feed to power a product carousel. It sounds complex, but we’ve built the infrastructure and mechanisms to enable these types of ads without needing massive engineering resources to get them off the ground.

Rob: Efficiency is clearly a big focus, especially removing the need to re-traffic. How much of an impact can those workflow changes have on creative turnaround and team bandwidth?

Colleen: Let’s say a campaign goes live and an ad tag is scheduled, but a client has put click impression trackers inside of the ad build. If a change needs to be made, it can now happen from the dashboard, then cascade through the campaign and push out a new, updated tag. No need to re-traffic that ad just because some of the tracking changed.

Another massive efficiency is that one tag can run many different places. Ad Ops teams don’t need 30 different tags with 30 different line IDs across properties and devices - or to merge that data - it’s all streamlined in one place.

Rob: On the analytics side, you’ve added visibility into things like invalid clicks and restricted impressions. What does that tell publishers about campaign quality that they couldn’t see before?

Colleen: Fraudulent traffic is a big issue. Most fraud is probably already filtered on the ad server side, but doesn’t show publishers filtered and unfiltered data side-by-side. We now show invalid clicks so teams have a sense of where they’re coming from or what portion of a campaign is being affected. If 3,000 of 5,000 clicks come from one IP address in a short period of time, we flag them, so the client can decide whether to block regions or change geotargeting.

And with the demands of GDPR, restricted impressions can wreak havoc on a campaign. If Clipcentric is missing from a CMP’s vendor list, for instance, we can show that impressions are being restricted before a campaign is silently under-delivering or running blank ads while another verified vendor still reports everything as normal.

Our aim is always to help clients keep track of potential campaign issues before they become huge problems.

Rob: You’re calling this an evolution, not just an update. What does that mean for publishers in practical terms? How should they think about Clipcentric’s role in their ad product strategy moving forward?

Colleen: We are in this for the long haul - our founders have been around since the early 2000s building creative Ad Tech solutions and our team is loaded with expertise, from all sides of the ad experience. Our goal is to enable publishers to always be able to say, “Yes, of course we can do that!” when an advertiser asks for something. We’re essentially putting powerful ad engineering resources at their fingertips, based on rock-solid technology, so that go-to-market for new ad products or executions is insanely fast.

Ready to bring your ads to market faster?

Clipcentric’s latest platform release lands squarely at the crossroads of creativity and efficiency - two things publishers desperately need more of right now. By combining automation, AI, and smart data integrations, it offers a way to keep premium display advertising both scalable and engaging, even in lean times. Learn more about how Clipcentric’s platform powers advertising’s best impressions.

This is content created in paid partnership with clipcentric.com. We only feature partners who we believe bring real value to the publisher community.