Online design was once a land of rich creative concepts overflowing with ingenuity and thoughtful attention to design elements. Astute online surfers needed to look no further than nearest website to see great creative in action. Now you have to surf far and wide to find terrific creative because mostly what you find is utilitarian ads built by machines trying to predict patterns based off a cookie.

• As the lines between Search and Display increasingly blur it comes at the cost of great creative. Why do I say this? Search ads are utilitarian in look. A certain number of lines, characters and colors are the ad. There is not much room to deviate. But most people forget that display ads sit in the beginning of the sales cycle. The exploratory phase where folks are weighing options and making decisions about what they desire so you see why creative execution becomes an essential component. Search sits at the other spectrum its much less used for decision driving than executing on a well researched idea. What does this mean? It means that creative concepts are much less removed than they should be for display ads because the look is uniform. Making creative decisions based on data can only get you so far.

• In the race to become more relevant we have actually become less relevant. I know that sounds confusing but think about it for a second. We respond to things that are emotional and stir up a certain emotion inside of us. (Funny ads make us laugh) Machine driven creative is just that, driven by a machine and devoid of emotion. Have you ever felt any compassion for your alarm clock when its batteries die? No, because its devoid of feeling just like these types of ads.

• The main purpose of pure creative is to catch the eye. Much of this dynamic stuff is made to be versatile and fit many formats and languages. Often this tends to be at the expense of truly great eye-catching creative. (You can't fit a square peg in a round hole unless you make the hole big enough to catch all) This catch-all creative is often overlooked as too utilitarian and not enough of a differentiator.