Strategy

Designing for scale

Role UX Manager  |  Responsibilities Leadership, strategy, designer, creative direction, cross-functional alignment, career development

TL;DR

A new business serving advertisers across the spectrum was created through my strategic vision, leadership, and cross-functional collaboration. 0-1 products require a flexible mindset, a passion to discover the unknown, and a love for the paths in which it leads. My work led to the creation of a durable set of design principles that became the bedrock for a near $1B, multi-platform, AI-driven, video ad creation business.

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A key pillar of the YouTube Ads strategy is centered around creating value for advertisers in the form of access, ease and efficiency.

Video advertising [historically] is a medium reserved for large advertisers with budgets to hire Creatives (individuals or agencies) to produce highly polished ads. While these advertisers make up the majority of YouTube’s revenue they only account for a small percentage of all advertisers on the platform. That leaves a massive amount of opportunity on the table—for YouTube and its users.

The advertisers that are shut out are small-medium businesses (SMBs) that market themselves on Google through display and search ads but lack the ability to utilize video as a powerful medium in their marketing strategy.

Enter video ad templates…

What is a video ad template?

At its core, a video ad template is the creative framework for an advertiser to market their brand and sell a product or service without the need for expertise or the high cost associated with video production. The template provides the creative expression and pairs that with advertiser assets (logo, brand color, marketing copy, and images) to create a tailored creative with very low effort.

Why are they valuable?

Video is HARD! It requires budget, time & expertise that most SMBs don’t have. This means the majority of advertisers using Google Ads/YouTube Ads are limited in how and where they can reach their target audiences. These limitations lead to: 

  • Advertiser: reduced campaign reach & channel diversity

  • Viewer: lower ad relevance & poorer ad experience

  • YouTube: unhealthy advertiser ecosystem

The solution is to provide advertisers rich video ads creation through tools that afford zero-spend, low-effort output that leads to increased campaign effectiveness. With this flood of new advertisers comes:

  • Net-new revenue stream for Google

  • Greater ad inventory for better viewer relevance

  • Stronger, healthier YouTube ecosystem that is far less head-heavy

User insights & planning

Creating a compelling and successful video ad for a single brand is no small feat but it comes with the advantage of known and constants. The design of that creative is centered around a single brand with a single campaign message and campaign goal.

How then do you undertake the design of a system that needs to serve not one brand but 10,000? 

You need to create a strategy that…

  • Serves a diverse set of advertisers across the full spectrum of industries and verticals

  • Create templates that don’t look like templates

  • Create ad with a bespoke feel that use professional looking animation and composition

  • Uses secondary design elements sparingly as to not distract from the brand and its messaging

The strategy needed a user-centered focus for both the templates themselves and the eventual UI that would support the editing and creation.

We started by hosting a design sprint with our partners from product, engineering, sales, and marketing to establish the foundations of successful video ads and how best to align them around YouTube’s established best-practices for bespoke ads. We then set out to run user research in the form of market testing in India, user interviews at Google Marketing Live and product piloting in North America.

With a Northstar now plotted and a product coming to life we had what we needed to develop a design strategy.

Laying out the strategy

With insights in-hand we got to task on creating a durable and scalable strategy for designing a library of templates. This library needed to serve the needs of many, expand as the business grew, operate with the constraints of technology, push the bounds of that technology to achieve richer creative expression, and adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of AI and automation.

The design strategy centered around 2 key art direction pillars:

Familiarity

People relate to, and value, the things they experience throughout their lives. We create emotional connection and bias towards norms and predictability in our environment. We have a personal relationship with the world around us, reinforced constantly by the sensory signals we are endlessly bombarded with.

1. Familiarity

2. Elevation

Elevation

Since our templates relied on static images to market products and services they needed to be visually and contextually elevated to be more impactful and feel bespoke in nature. 

These pillars were now the foundation of each template we set out to create. When combined with the rest of the core elements derived from our insights work we were able to create a library of templates serving a wide array of advertisers across industry, marketing objectives, and campaign type. At the same time, we had created a product that filled a valuable user need.

Art direction in action

Pivoting the strategy

As our template ad solutions grew in adoption the team began to focus our attention on automation and full-scale growth. To this point, templated ads were largely being created for our user-facing editing tool, Video Builder, but as our technology advanced and AI became more robust we changed tack and moved in a new direction.

The templates, and the Video Builder product they supported, were designed as more generalized creatives for use by smaller, less brand-sensitive advertisers. This was a strategic decision that allowed us to grow the product quickly and serve many advertisers with a smaller set of templates. But that came at a cost as we pivoted to automation as a means to scale the business to serve higher spend advertisers. We quickly discovered that the needs of these advertisers were more nuanced and their brand identities more sensitive. A more generic template that serves a Mom & Pop business down the street isn’t going to meet the needs of a fast-growing product business looking to establish themselves, and their brand, in a highly competitive marketing landscape. 

We now focused on a strategy creating templates around 5 brand personalities.

These personalities now allowed us to tailor our creative toward specific attributes of a brand that more closely match their identity. For example, Estée Lauder would have a template that was “Sophisticated”, while Ford Trucks would have something more “Rugged”. This type of automation and assignment required both the work of my team to establish the categorization and new creatives to support it, it also meant new robust AI to use explicit and implicit signals about an advertiser to assign the correct template, the right brand color, typeface, and music.

The fruits of this work, and my impact on it, are still being realized but the early results are significant. What was a small, experimental product just 6 years ago has grown into a business nearing $800MM annually, at its height, responsible for 50% of all ads running on YouTube.

Looking back

It's hard to imagine that when I joined this team, video ad creation at YouTube was a skunk works project with a small team supporting it. What I enjoyed so much at my time on this team was starting from zero. All of us charging forward with the same level of ignorance and curiosity. We thrived in the ambiguity and relished the opportunity. I am, to this day, still astonished by what we were all able to accomplish working together on a shared vision to democratize video ad creation and create an entirely new business for YouTube.