Crafting Ads Creative Studio from the Onset

Sole designer from video ads for Ads Creative Studio, a new platform for creative people to make ads more easily. I designed end to end user journeys of dynamic construction flow for both display and video from scratch. I realigned vision, drove alignment and balanced effective user experience with fast speed in 3 quarters, resulting in positive customer feedback and revenue growth of 30% per week.

Ads Creative Studio's Review page

Background

Develop a consolidated platform for all Google’s ads creative tools and asset libraries, targeted and designed specifically for creative users to support their core workflows and facilitate collaboration between creative and media users. This is a cross-org effort between 3 teams: Youtube Ads, Google Ads, and Display Video 360.

Dynamic ads
Customized workflows across channels (video, display, audio). Customized creative is a large investment area. It generates 50% more conversions compared to traditional creative.

Problem Space

There're 3 biggested user pain points:

  • Dynamic workflow is disconnected because it runs across multiple platforms
  • Creatives lack visibility into the dynamic strategy
  • Construction, preview and review process is cumbersome

Now, here come the design challenges:

  • How might we create a cohesive experience for creative users?
  • How might we give creative people visibility into dynamic strategy?
  • How might we empower creative users to make ads more easily?

Design Iterations

The development of the new creative platform was an intricate endeavor that necessitated extensive collaboration and alignment across multiple organizations. To achieve a cohesive design, we meticulously harmonized the intrinsic complexities of both video ad and display ad workflows, fostering a unified platform that seamlessly integrates the creative and media user experiences. This painstaking process involved numerous iterations before a shippable design candidate emerged.

Information architecture
Information architecture supports flexible collaboration.

Final design

Template: Establish Swappable Elements for Strategic Ad Personalization

template

Using a visual-first workflow, users can seamlessly construct and preview ad templates by incorporating various elements and fine-tuning styles. This process allows them to identify which elements can be swapped out. For instance, the base video can be swapped to generate different video variations tailored to specific audiences. The remaining three elements (logo, message, and voiceover) remain constant, ensuring consistency across ad variations. This approach enhances creative users' understanding of the dynamic strategy.

Variants: Unleash Creative Potential with Ease

variants

Users can effortlessly create ad variations on the Variants page. Swappable elements are conveniently displayed on the right panel, empowering brands and creative teams to craft and test unique display and video formats with ease.

Rules: Unravel Dynamic Strategy Complexities

Rules

The Rules tab serves as the central hub for advertisers to define their targeting criteria, encompassing factors such as audience type, geographic location, date and time parameters, and more. These targeting signals can then be seamlessly assigned to one or more ad variations

Review: Effortless Quality Control

Review

Finally, the Review tab provides a comprehensive platform for advertisers to meticulously examine ad variations generated based on diverse targeting rules. This centralized review process ensures that the right ad variations are precisely matched to their intended audience.

Cohesive experience

I crafted a cohesive user experience for both video ads and display ads, ensuring a unified brand identity while addressing specific use cases for each format.

Video ads and display ads comparison

Impact

After more than a year of hard work, we launched this new platform.

Revenue growth is 30% per week and we received positive customer feedback:

  • General Motors, an auto manufacturer, saw a 56% increase in Google searches and reduced costs by 30%
  • Dutch creative agency Men in Green achieved a 278% higher click-through rate and lowered costs by 64%.

"Among the many benefits of Ads Creative Studio, production time saving and the large amount of videos produced are the ones that we found most impactful."

"Ads Creative Studio is the perfect solution for our challenge. It gives a risk-free environment to build creatives and allows for easy collaboration between multiple designers"

Challenges

The biggest challenge for this project was to design the enterprise ecosystem for advertisers, creative agencies, and media agencies. I was able to lead this high-impact initiatives from concept to execution in technical business areas through bridging the gap between diverse stakeholder perspectives and fostering alignment.

In one notable instance, I collaborated with researcher Katrina to facilitate alignment among stakeholders who held differing assumptions about a product's functionality. Through a series of informal discussions and visual illustrations, we were able to reconcile these divergent viewpoints and establish a shared understanding.

Furthermore, I have played a crucial role in driving consensus that presented significant challenges due to its novelty and complexity. Using rough wireframes and effective communication strategies, I empowered PMs and engineers to articulate their ideas and secure buy-in from XFN teams, expediting the approval process.

Next project

Launching Generative AI Vision

See case study