The Ultimate Guide to Agile Marketing in Display Ads

Agile marketing is about taking small steps, minimizing risk, and failing fast — all in an effort to figure out what works as efficiently as possible.

As a methodology, it focuses on an iterative approach to planning and executing, learning quickly, and having a bias towards action. Agile marketing means listening to what your customer wants, programming your ads to reflect relevant topics, updating, and measuring.

So why does agile marketing matter in display advertising? Because display is growing and marketers can't afford to rely on static text and image ads to meet ROI objectives. Forrester Research predicts that interactive display media in the U.S. will double between 2012 and 2017 to become a $28 billion industry, one that is ripe to adopt the flexibility and real-time nature that marketers have grown accustomed to with their social media.

With agile marketing in display ads, brands can update their ads in real-time with the same ease that they update their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. This incremental approach allows marketers to create relevant, timely marketing that matches the pace of the evolving digital landscape.

Popular forms of online media—social, search, display—continue to unfold at a lightning pace. Agile marketing is especially salient in display advertising due to the broad reach, multitude of formats, and endless variations in content type. In this guide, we'll examine the who, how, and why of agile marketing, and demonstrate the enormous potential of adopting an agile approach to display ad development.

Let's dive in!