Blue Shield of California – DCO Campaigns
Blue Shield of California provides insurance solutions for the state of California, including Medicare supplement plans for seniors. Our focus here was their DCO campaigns, which included creative files from their previous agency. We also made net-new creatives and dynamic feeds for their insurance AEP season.
Not only did I lead and manage my team for planning and execution of this project, but I also did the vast majority of the DCO rebuild.
Platform: Doubleclick Studio, Display & Video 360
Tooling: Google Web Designer, Excel, Adobe Suite (XD, Illustrator, Photoshop)


The Rebuild
When we acquired this client in early 2021, they had a DCO build from their previous agency partner that they needed to put back into production immediately and they needed it to be as close to exactly the same as it was before. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Doubleclick Studio and the way these creatives and feeds were built, they weren’t in a state to just immediately start serving again. BSC’s relationship with their previous agency had went sour and they were unwilling to provide support and key pieces of the puzzle, so we had to scramble to get everything back in order.
After a large amount of planning, reworking, and unfortunate licensure issues, we were able to get their DCO campaigns back up and running. 70+ Google Web Designer creatives were condensed into one versatile creative, and hundreds of dynamic feeds were condensed into one feed sheet. The final row count for the feed was well over 500,000 lines, which lined up with the previous agency’s strategy.
Leveraging Excel and VB.NET for Accuracy and Agility
Condensing all of these copy variations, images, landing URLs, etc. was a monumental feat, and I had to find a way to keep everything correct, accurate, and easily changed while maintaining the integrity of the feeds. After a lot of research, Excel ended up being the solution of choice here. There were a few feeds needed after the initial rebuild of their initial DCO approach, and each feed received a master Excel sheet. Power Query was utilized to generate all of the copy, line item ID, image, and reporting label combinations automatically, and a few VB.NET macros had to be built to manage and augment this process. Version control was introduced to these sheets via Git to make sure any changes could be reverted should any problems be found.


Google Web Designer – Situational Superiority
While I had many reservations about Google Web Designer as a product, it does DCO extremely well. My team’s perseverance in learning the quirks of this program was nothing but inspirational, and we got to the point where we could do a ton of creative work in very little time.
Dynamic creatives were used to implement responsive sizing requirements where needed, and we leveraged the code view of this program to implement several interesting features that didn’t come out of the box with GWD, like DV360 dynamic query strings for our landing URLs and logic to change creative layouts based on incoming dynamic elements combined with real-time creative sizing.
While most of us scoffed at using this thing for anything remotely close to web development, it ended up being an extremely valuable tool for implementing HTML5-based advertising solutions, and I would now recommend it to anyone needing tools for this purpose.
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