Customization of online advertising creatives: follow up

A couple months ago, I wrote this blog post about Wilkes University and how it's "targeting" ads in several media to individual students the institution wants to recruit. I briefly mentioned the "Find a mortgage in insert your community name here" types of ads that you see around the Web. A few more thoughts on that topic:

• Cory Treffiletti of Catalyst:SF just wrote a brief post about ad creative auto-development, where you can get a company to personalize your ads and how they're delivered. He links to three companies that provide this service, although in slightly different ways.
  
  
• A number of advertisers and agencies outsource their design work (or perhaps "final assembly of an already designed ad" is a better way to put it) to arrive at a customized look for their ads. First they'll design an ad template or look and feel in house. Then they'll outsource the final step -- the "assembly" -- to companies in China, India, and other low-cost nations. The inexpensive workers will start with the template and will actually develop hundreds, thousands, or more GIF or Flash-based creatives that are personalized for the specific targets of your campaign. It's a much lower tech way of accomplishing the same thing, rather than dynamically inserting the information into the ad. But it's probably just as cost effective in many cases.