Creative Ad Formats to Grow Your Audience | Criteo
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Creative Ad Formats to Grow Your Audience
Explore the creative ad formats that can best amplify your campaigns, while powerfully telling your brand’s story.
Updated on November 17, 2025
When it comes to effectively grabbing the attention of your audiences, launching the right creative ad experiences makes all the difference. With each creative ad format, advertisers can unlock varying audience growth outcomes—whether it’s driving first-time shoppers to their business or inspiring long-term loyalty among existing customers.
Advertisers looking for the right creative digital ads for their acquisition and retention goals can experiment with a variety of formats to evaluate their strongest performing strategies, and optimize their campaigns to the fullest potential.
Criteo’s guide to creative ad formats
Video Ads use a brand’s video assets to highlight campaign messaging or recommend products. This format is ideal for brands that want to increase user engagement among new and existing customers. With Criteo Commerce Growth, brands can get their message in front of shoppers that are most likely to watch, engage, and learn from this content.
Dynamic Ads leverage a product catalog to generate conversions by personalizing content and messaging for each shopper experience. Criteo helps advertisers evolve the ads’ look and feel with Dynamic Creative Optimization+ (DCO+), showing consumers the right ad element combinations across every device with display, social, and native placements.
Showcase Ads have the responsive benefits and DCO+ technology of dynamic ads while allowing advertisers to combine engaging images or videos. This format empowers businesses to deliver promotional or brand messages alongside best sellers, new arrivals, or specific product recommendations from product catalogs.
Adaptive Ads feature brand images, videos, and messaging that adapt to any publisher ad space. Unlike showcase and dynamic ads, adaptive ads don’t require a product catalog—yet adaptive ads still leverage responsive benefits and DCO+ technology across display and native placements.
Rich Media Ads spark user engagement and interaction using a combination of video, images, products, and product recommendations. These ads captivate audiences by offering everything from 360 views to swiping, scrolling, search, lead form capabilities, and more.
Image Ads allow advertisers to decide how to tell a brand story with readymade images. Allowing complete creative control, Image Ads can be composed of a static image or an animated image in a range of sizes.
Maximize the impact of creative ads with strategic storytelling technology
Now that you know more about the creative ad formats that can bring your campaign to life, let’s learn about how to unlock the best results possible.
Optimize for clicks and rotate your ads evenly according to your needs. For those looking to experiment with different ad formats, leverage Criteo’s AI Engine to optimize for clicks against multiple formats (for example image ads vs. adaptive ads.) Advertisers looking to reduce user fatigue can also choose to experiment by rotating their ads formats evenly.
Leverage ad sequencing in your delivery strategy. Criteo’s ad sequencing solution defines optimal creative ad formats and delivers a connected brand experience throughout a single campaign.
Build a messaging hierarchy with dynamic rules. Criteo’s Creative Decision Tree Builder uses DCO+ and dynamic rules to generate messaging and creative variations that adapt the campaign narrative based on shopper contexts.
See Criteo’s creative ads in action
Enhance the consumer journey by delivering the right ads, with the right messages, at the right time, for every individual shopper. With Criteo Commerce Growth, advertisers can captivate shoppers with not only a wide variety of compelling ad formats, but also design highly customized ad experiences that leverage product discovery messaging tailored for each individual’s interests.
To learn more about Criteo’s creative ad formats and Commerce Growth, talk to an expert who can help you understand how to best optimize your digital advertising campaigns.
Want to explore real-world examples of creative ad formats? Our Ad Gallery showcases samples of creative ads that Criteo launched to help you find inspiration for your next campaign.