• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 24, 2015

You don’t have to be a weatherman to know what the most obvious ways of pre-planning programmatic creative. The answer according to the programmatic creative panel that opened Day Two of the Programmatic Insider Summit in Scottsdale, AZ, is right outside your door.

“Putting creative together ahead of time that is weather-related,” suggested Jeremy Leonard, COO and executive vice president of Colorado digital shop IMM, adding, “Weather is the kind of thing that doesn’t throw anyone off-message or off-strategy, per se.”

“Location” is another, said Jeff Campbell, director of media at iCrossing, adding, “If you’re a solar energy provider and you are targeting people in New England and California, you wouldn’t want the colonial home” featured to consumers in Southern California.

The difficult part, said Sam Temes, Global Product Strategy at Google’s Doubleclick unit, is developing “non-standard” concepts for pre-planning programmatic creative.

“Weather feeds, location are pretty standard,” he said, adding, “Where the challenge comes is how do you work with things that are less standard.”

Temes gave an example of a brand that worked with Google to develop real-time creative versioning based on the World Cup soccer tournament, enabling ads to be updated on-the-fly when teams scored on the playing field.