Goodbye DCO. Hello AIO.

It’s a bold statement, I know—especially from someone who spent over five years advocating for Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) on the agency side. But after navigating the complexities of leveraging DCO in marketing ad tech stacks, one thing is clear: it’s time to move on.

This isn’t a critique of the key players in the space (you know who they are). The reality is, the DCO landscape has seen significant mergers and acquisitions for a reason. Scaling traditional DCO technology requires an extensive—and expensive—human touch. Humans manage accounts, decision trees, integrations, creative updates, performance analysis—you name it. And with more people come more errors, inefficiencies, and skyrocketing costs.

Let’s break down the costs you are paying with DCO:

• Software: $50,000–$75,000 per month, with minimums of $25,000.
• Templates and APIs: $5,000 each.
• Decision trees: Costs to ingest product feeds, location feeds, logic strings, and fallback logic.
• Specialized talent: Creative Strategists and Media Strategists, each costing $100,000/year to analyze performance and design campaign logic.
• Quality assurance: While platforms have some built-in checks, manual QA for thousands of ad variations adds even more costs.

Add it all up, and you’re looking at nearly $1 million per year in costs—before generating a single sale.

Whereas with AI Optimization (AIO):

• No monthly minimums
• No production fees
• No decision trees or product feeds
• No reliance on cookies
• No manual activation of thousands of ads prone to human error
• No need for specialized strategists just to interpret performance

AIO determines the best content for every single impression in your campaign, evolving over time through proprietary machine learning and this is why we have beat traditional DCO in head-to-head tests.

AIO allows:

• Creative teams to be truly creative—free from rigid design rules or boxes.
• Media teams to focus on driving conversions, engagement, and return on ad spend.
• Every dollar you spend to work harder, eliminating wasted time, energy, and resources.

Once upon a time, DCO was the disruptor. AIO is the disruptor now. Welcome to 2025. Claritas looks forward to helping you modernize and evolve your advertising strategy.