FeedLabs – Revolutionizing Dynamic Product Advertising with Squaremoon

Introduction

Squaremoon, a Dutch digital marketing agency specializing in paid social advertising consultancy, works with large multinational companies to optimize their advertising strategies. One of their preferred methods is using Dynamic Product Ads through Meta Ads, allowing businesses to advertise their entire product catalog within a single, automatically optimized campaign. However, the limitation of this technique is the basic, plain product images typically used as creatives. To address this challenge, Squaremoon partnered with Phico to develop a platform that would enable their clients to design dynamic templates, resulting in more engaging creatives and increased click-through rates. The result of this collaboration is FeedLabs. While the project has since concluded, it demonstrated the power of tailored, scalable solutions and helped pave the way for future innovations in digital advertising.

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The goal for the MVP was to take a designer's creative concept and apply it across all product images in a catalog, often stored as a CSV file. The templates were to include dynamic elements — such as text, images, and conditionally rendered components — all driven by data provided in the catalog. This presented two key challenges:

1. Rendering a design with all its dynamic elements.
2. Scaling the rendering process to handle up to hundreds of thousands of updates per hour.

To solve the first challenge, we developed a custom Figma plugin. This plugin empowered designers to easily add dynamic elements to their creations, which could then be fetched by a custom backend service whenever changes were made. For the second challenge, we utilized Google Cloud Functions, enabling the processing of hundreds of thousands of creatives within minutes. This was achieved using a custom rendering engine built on top of Fabric.js, an HTML canvas framework in JavaScript.

FeedLabs platform UI

The MVP took approximately six months to complete and included the following components:

• The FeedLabs web platform for users to manage their designs and feeds.
• A custom rendering engine capable of transforming the designs into dynamic creatives.
• A Figma plugin for easily integrating dynamic elements into product templates.
• A website with a landing page, pricing page, and competitor comparison pages for better user engagement and positioning.

Phase 2: Extending the Platform

With the successful launch of the MVP, Squaremoon's clients were highly satisfied and eager for more features. Recognizing the potential of FeedLabs, Squaremoon envisioned expanding the platform's capabilities to serve other industries, such as the news sector. This new feature would allow the automatic posting of individual feed items to social media channels, expanding its utility beyond product catalogs.

In this phase, we focused on integrating closely with social media APIs. To keep the approach lean, we prioritized the most commonly used platforms for Squaremoon's clients: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This new functionality, known as Autoposter, leverages the existing Cloud Function setup for efficient operation and scalability.

The Autoposter runs every 15 minutes, based on scheduling configurations set within the FeedLabs platform. It determines what content to post and when. Each of the three social media channels has its own tailored setup, yet the system is designed to be extensible, allowing easy integration of additional platforms that may be added in the future.

FeedLabs Autoposter UI

Conclusion

FeedLabs has proven to be an invaluable tool for Squaremoon and its clients, providing a scalable and dynamic approach to paid social advertising. By allowing designers to easily create engaging and visually appealing templates and automating their deployment across multiple channels, FeedLabs represents the next step in effective digital marketing. The collaboration between Squaremoon and Phico showcases the potential of lean, agile development in transforming creative concepts into powerful, market-ready products.