Play the Happy Bird game and watch data-driven creative take flight

More and more digital marketers are using data to tailor ads. Why? Data allows marketers to create ads that better resonate with consumers through increased relevancy and targeting. But there’s no reason to stop at dynamic text or images – leading agencies and brands are taking it a step further by using programmatic methods to create immersive ads that are driven by consumers’ preferences and passions. Now we’ve created a new experience – the Happy Bird game – to bring the power of data-driven creative to life.

With 70% of a media campaign’s performance hinging on the creative¹, it’s vital for creative teams to know every trick in the book in order to produce the kinds of ads that will captivate people’s attention in a packed digital marketplace.

Happy Bird is a game that lets agency teams and clients explore and demonstrate how dynamic data signals can be used to customise an ad creative and bring real-time relevance to users. By altering inputs such as such as the player’s age, gender, interests and music choice, the Happy Bird game is automatically personalised to suit the user.

Once you’ve taken data-driven creative for a test drive with Happy Bird, building your own similar ad experience might not be as difficult as you think. Here’s a step-by-step guide to putting the approach to work for you.

Build

Happy Bird was built using Google Web Designer, a free HTML5 authoring tool integrated into the DoubleClick stack which makes it easy to create beautiful, engaging motion graphics that can run on any device. The game uses lightweight CSS animations and motion paths while leveraging Google Web Designer’s own built-in responsive layout manager.

Host

Happy Bird is hosted on DoubleClick Studio, a creative management platform that gives users full control over assets and creative behaviour.

Serve

Because DoubleClick Studio plugs directly into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, ad serving at scale is easy. DoubleClick Studio’s dynamic offering automatically chooses which creative variation to serve, matching up audience signals with appropriate creative content.

Target

Speaking of audience signals, in Happy Bird you tweaked the user preferences yourself before starting to play the game. But in a real-life context, you can let technology do the tweaking for you, tailoring the creative automatically based on data. For example, Google, DoubleClick and Google Analytics 360 data provides marketers with ways to find the right users, what they’re interested in and their passions. DoubleClick Bid Manager then accommodates real-time targeting to ensure that each creative variation is served to the right person at the right time.

Measure

The DoubleClick suite helps track rich media creative interactions, serving behaviour, user analytics and game performance. Insights gathered in this way can then be used to inform the creative experience and optimise future campaigns.