The Universal Asset Kit is a tool that allows a creative team to quickly build comps of every owned marketing banner for a campaign. Text and images are added to a series of master fields, and then are automatically populated in individual banner comps. The kit was developed to support a new targeting model, called Global Offers.

Wellsfargo.com, like countless other sites, has a wide range of targeted banner placements. Marketing campaigns are set up to utilize certain placements, which dictates what banners the creative team has to make.

Not long ago, our team proposed a new model for how banners could be targeted and served. What we asked was this: “What if, instead of building individual banners for each placement, we just fed the sized images and copy into the targeting tool, and it could serve them up in any placement on the site, based on customer data and targeting rules?”

The implications of this shift are significant. It would allow essentially any offer or message to be delivered through any placement on the site. And it would greatly simplify campaign planning, as well as creative development and execution. The work involved to implement such a change is also significant, and it has not been completed yet, but our team has been on the forefront, pushing for a change that we see as critical.