Dow Jones, a leader in business news and information, and home to brands like The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and more, set out to discover new ways to build upon its strong digital advertising offering. With a reputation for editorial excellence, the company’s advertising team is constantly focused on ensuring that the caliber of its campaigns meets the expectations of premium advertisers.
A challenge scaling ad products with limited resources
Dow Jones faced a multi-pronged challenge: fragmented ad production across multiple vendors, growing a new in-house creative services team, and continued bandwidth concerns from a still-growing ad products team. With ambitious goals to increase impressions and campaign volume, Dow Jones needed a smarter, more scalable approach to drive their creative operations.
Transforming ad product workflows with Celtra
Dow Jones implemented Celtra to bring their creative in-house and build an ad product infrastructure built on a templated, streamlined workflow for their team. Starting with a few ad units, they began transitioning from external vendors to Celtra’s platform. The team transitioned in record time and achieved 30% increased efficiencies.
Initially scoped as a year-long transition, Dow Jones brought all of their creative services in-house by utilizing Celtra’s flexible, self-serve platform. They unlocked efficiencies through the internal adoption of Celtra’s Ad Products, Trafficking, and Reporting Templates, improving the quality, consistency, and speed of the team.
Prior to using Celtra, the production timeline for even simple ad units could stretch across several weeks when relying on external vendors. However, with the adoption of Celtra’s platform, Dow Jones significantly reduced this time, achieving a turnaround in as little as 10 business days.
Celtra’s centralized platform didn’t just streamline their production flows; it reshaped what their creative teams, ad ops, and sales could accomplish:
- Creative teams increased output and freed time for ideation: Templates eliminated tedious task – a 30-minute creative build edit became a 1-minute task for the team.
- Ad ops became highly efficient: With everything centralized in Celtra, the ad ops team no longer juggled multiple files and platforms. Tweaking templates required minimal involvement from creatives, drastically shrinking their production turnaround.
- Creative and sales aligned to drive performance: Celtra’s custom reporting allowed for vertical-specific benchmarking and insights, enabling faster decisions between creative and sales teams and better client servicing.
Creative agility freed up growth and innovation
Today, creative services play a central role in over 30% of incoming RFPs—a clear sign of just how critical custom ad experiences have become. But rather than seeing this demand as a challenge, the team saw a powerful opportunity.
With Celtra’s templated workflows and platform flexibility, Dow Jones gained the freedom to experiment, innovate, and move quickly. Designers and product teams could now develop new sizes, refine concepts, and launch and test how well units resonated with their brands and market at speed.
By controlling the quality and consistency of their ad products, Dow Jones increased both performance and scale. When they first began transitioning creative builds in-house, only 5-10% of live WSJ campaigns used high-impact formats. Sales set a bold target: reach 50% adoption by the end of the year. With Celtra in place, they surpassed that goal within months.
Within their first year, they more than doubled their overall impression volume and continuously grew their campaign volume. Today, 85-95% of all live campaigns feature high-impact, innovative formats, proving that with the right team, workflows, and solutions in place, a lean team can drive outsized impact.
Innovation demand and the answer: Thematic AI and personalized performance
With foundational workflows in place, Dow Jones turned its attention towards innovations and finding new ways to use creative and technology to drive growth. One of the standout innovations was the introduction of “Thematic AI,” the company’s proprietary ad tool that delivers impression-level personalization powered by AI and real-time data feeds.
For the company’s portfolio of brands, a major challenge was ensuring that the rich editorial content produced by their writers didn’t get lost in the noise. These units adapted to individual users based on behavior, time of day, and content context—turning a once-static ad into a high-performance creative experience.
Designed and executed in Celtra Builder, Thematic AI ads were standardized for scale across brands and verticals. This meant faster iteration, consistent branding, and customizable experiences. For Dow Jones, not only did this innovation set a new bar for creative excellence, but it also proved that personalization and performance go hand-in-hand.
Looking ahead – AI, video and beyond
Today, Dow Jones’s creative teams are preparing for their next chapter. With a solid in-house foundation in place, they’re ready to expand into video, interactive storytelling, and deeper AI-driven personalization. Already mapping out how to leverage Celtra’s upcoming AI capabilities, the team is exploring ways to push the boundaries of what ad products can do and unlocking new creative formats that are dynamic, personalized, and highly engaging.
