Crafting Hyper-Local Commerce

Hyper-local commerce brings the opportunity of giving every consumer tailored ads that truly reflect what's in stock nearby. For Shipt, reaching audiences at the neighborhood level isn’t a branding ambition but instead a logistical and creative challenge that requires us to rethink the way we manage digital campaigns at scale. In partnership with our Monks strategy team, we set out to deliver highly relevant, in-stock product ads to in-market audiences across the open web, aiming for authentic personalization while keeping the process operationally feasible.

The Scale of the Challenge

At first glance, the campaign objective seemed straightforward: match consumers with specific products available in their own ZIP codes. But breaking it down revealed a monumental undertaking: we were staring down a problem of scale that’s familiar to many commerce marketers, but rarely to this degree.

Our challenges included:

• Needing over a million unique ad creatives, each reflecting real-time availability for consumers in 15,000 ZIP codes nationwide
• Pulling data from 10 product feeds, encompassing more than 180,000 individual products
• Delivering across a variety of open web placements, each requiring relevance, brand integrity, and timely product updates
• Tight timeline and resource constraints, ruling out any fully manual or semi-automated approaches

Legacy creative and campaign management tools, frankly, could not handle this. The sheer number of asset versions and the pace required would have resulted in not just budget overruns, but missed opportunities for actual audience engagement. Efficiency was non-negotiable.

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Automating the Complexity: Our Approach

The approach had to zero in on three principles: automation, simplification, and a focus on outcome. We chose to pair dynamic creative automation with a DSP built for streamlined execution, removing friction while maintaining creative diversity.

Dynamic Creative Workflow

Instead of manually building out each asset, dynamic creative automation ingested all 10 product feeds. From there, the system automatically built ad variants for the 180k+ products, mapping each one to the relevant ZIP code. This allowed us to go beyond multiplying templates; we connected up-to-date inventory with audience location in real time, making every ad served both local and accurate.

It was critical that the automation preserved brand identity and tailored messaging, avoiding the generic feel that often plagues templated creative. Our team controlled the structure and rules, while the system handled the heavy lifting, removing the risk of human error and the bottleneck of manual revision cycles.

DSP Setup for Efficiency

Media activation added a layer of necessary simplicity. Instead of sprawling campaigns with intricate segmentation, we operated a single campaign structure using seven lines and five creative tags. (No, really.) Yahoo DSP’s optimization engine managed bidding and placement for KPI alignment (conversion, engagement, etc.), freeing our analysts and creative strategists to focus on higher-order decisions.

This straightforward setup paid dividends in launch speed, version control and ongoing optimization. Iterations could happen rapidly in response to stock changes, audience shifts, or geographic demand patterns.

Balancing Variety and Simplicity

A key concern in automating creative at scale was losing variety or compromising contextual relevance. The balance we struck allowed us to maintain real diversity (i.e. product visuals, offers, localized details) all while letting the automation handle routing and delivery. The result was a campaign that felt individually tailored without being operationally overwhelming - no easy task.

Outcomes: Translating Strategy to Results

The question is: did this approach deliver? The conversion rate rose by a factor of 10.5 over previous benchmarks, an outcome that stood out not just in the numbers, but in the speed with which we could prove and repeat success.

But one of the biggest wins, from our perspective, wasn’t just the metric uplift, but the ability to launch, scale, adjust and maintain such an ambitious campaign without drowning our team in an endless cycle of asset production or campaign edits.

It allowed us to respond immediately to inventory shifts, quickly test local messages, and provide every consumer with an ad that felt relevant and timely. In many ways, the operational simplicity unlocked by dynamic automation was just as much a differentiator as the creative diversity itself.

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Reflections and Key Learnings

Campaigns demanding hyper-local relevance and timely inventory updates will only become more common for commerce marketers. Our experience at Shipt shows that scaling personalization doesn’t have to be synonymous with spiraling complexity if the right automation and workflow principles are in place.

Three practical lessons emerged for our team:

• Automate where scale exceeds human limits, but always safeguard brand integrity and creative autonomy
• Design campaign structures that privilege simplicity over segmentation for faster iteration and adaptability
• Continuously monitor results and system feedback to keep messaging relevant and effective.

The collaborative execution of this initiative, from robust data integration to smart creative delivery, enabled outstanding results and an efficient campaign lifecycle. The bottom line is that Yahoo Creative via Yahoo DSP took a really complex strategy and made it easy to execute. Their team helped us scale dynamic creative effortlessly and the performance has been some of the best we’ve seen so far.

The future of digital commerce is shifting toward locally tailored experiences at massive scale, and the tools we used at Shipt + Monks proved that operational simplicity and creative variety don’t have to be at odds. For teams facing similar challenges, blending creative automation with streamlined DSP setup offers a clear path to measurable impact.

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¹Source: Yahoo Internal Data, March-June 2025