
Context








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Retailers do not price products equally across geographies
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This makes the creation of ads very complex, involving thousands of pricing variations nationwide
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What began as a quick company experiment to solve this issue, quickly became one of the fastest growing, key revenue-generating products: dynamic social media ads that are designed and coded in-house and populate pricing with automation software
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For a single campaign, 12-28 ads were custom designed and coded by a single designer
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This required 3 full business days for the design and 5 for code
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Retailers were not happy with the 5-week turnaround time (including processing time) and highly motivated clients were turning away
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Experimental templates had been hurriedly coded and were now highly outdated and overly complex
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Only 3 of 10 designers felt comfortable with the code
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Restrictions imposed by Facebook and Google, limitations of our existing templates and software clashes between Mac and PC led to an extensive and time-consuming debugging process
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These limitations on the creative team were holding the product back and simply hiring more designers would not solve the problem; we had to revamp our process and templates
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With a year of experience under my belt and intimate knowledge of the pain points and limitations, I took on the role of Creative Lead for this product
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The solution would not come overnight; it would require a complete overhaul of our templates, processes and training
Solution
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The first step was to standardize the templates in order to limit the movement of dynamically coded elements on the page
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Due to size and space constraints as well as third party restrictions (ex. Facebook’s 20% text rule), there were only a handful of layouts that worked well to begin with, so removing the guesswork for designers was a time-saver
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I built the templates in Sketch and employed extensive nested symbols to save time and ensure consistency
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Swapping brand colours and logos across 28 mocks was now as simple as updating a single, master symbol once and the background is the only custom design work required moving forward

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Because the layouts were now standardized, the text boxes, logos, etc. could also be pre-coded, leaving only fonts and colours to be coded each time
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In order to instill confidence in all designers on the team, I gave the templates a complete overhaul by renaming confusing jargon, annotating each div and leveraging commenting to include examples and warnings in order to avoid breaking the templates
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I wrote extensive documentation and posted to our company’s internal channels to serve as a central source of truth and a convenient reference point for designers working on the templates
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I booked time with a senior developer to help update the code to include increased flexibility and positioning options, including the additional ability to place a full-width themed banner in an ad
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I held retraining sessions for current teammates and developed a comprehensive on-boarding plan for new hires
Outcome
4X
increase in total number of campaigns going live
(from 2 campaigns/month to 8)
4X
turnaround for a holiday-themed campaign for Walmart, capitalizing on significantly more budget for the company
3X
over
increase in total number team members able to work on ads
(from 3 team members to 10)
50%
reduction in overall campaign time
(from 25 to 10 business days)
50%
reduction in Creative Team timelines
(from 8 to 4 business days)