The Times doubles real-time performance with creative automation for Meta Advantage+

In the fast-paced world of news media, speed and agility are essential for success. The Times wanted to ensure their ad creatives on Meta were highly relevant and engaging, turning audiences into subscribers. To achieve this, they needed a scalable solution that would enable them to turn their most compelling assets–their latest news stories–into Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) on Meta.

Meta’s ASC is an automated ad campaign type that uses machine learning to optimize ad delivery, targeting, and creative across Meta’s platforms to drive more conversions with minimal manual setup. ASC allows for large amounts of creatives to power optimization of the best performing creatives to the most perceptive audiences. The Times turned to Smartly to unlock the full power of ASC through Smartly’s dynamic image templates. 

With Smartly’s automation feeds, The Times was able to automate the generation of creatives dynamically based on the latest news stories across different formats while maintaining brand consistency and eliminating the need to manually set up individual ads. By using automation feeds, the team at The Times was able to triple the amount of creatives produced with no additional time required, simultaneously unlocking creative diversity on Meta and saving valuable time.

The combination of dynamic creative templates and the latest news stories proved to be a winning formula for The Times. They doubled their subscriptions year over year since adopting Smartly, with an 84% increase in conversion rate and an impressive 55% drop in cost per acquisition (CPA), to acquire new subscribers, compared to their business-as-usual (BAU) results. Based on the success with the format, The Times is exploring utilizing the same approach with video templates to produce creatives that are even more engaging.

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