SuperAwesome - building a product vision for youth advertising
SuperAwesome was the leading platform for privacy-safe digital advertising to under-18 audiences, a genuine specialist in a space that most of the industry was only beginning to take seriously. But the company was at an inflection point. Revenue was under pressure, the product offering had grown into a suite of disconnected tools with no unified platform narrative, and competitors were beginning to close the gap on what had been a proprietary privacy advantage.
I joined as Head of Product, Ads with a clear brief: make sense of what existed, develop a unified product vision, and get something built within the year.
The first task was to map the full campaign lifecycle against every tool the company had. The result was a working document that showed how all the existing components related to each other and where the gaps were.
PRODUCT STRATEGY
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
PRODUCT DESIGN
TEAM LEADERSHIP
From that foundation I developed a three-pillar strategic framework: leverage SuperAwesome's unmatched cross-channel reach to position competitors as point solutions; translate deep youth audience expertise into a real data and insights product rather than giving it away for free; and build a tangible platform UI to make all of it accessible to clients.
I reorganized the product team around this framework: a "face" layer responsible for the client-facing platform, a "heart" layer owning the underlying programmatic infrastructure, and a "brain" layer responsible for audience data and intelligence.
From there I designed a rough version of the product end-to-end, covering login, home dashboard, audience browsing and creation, strategy and channel selection, media, campaigns, and outcomes. The product, called Awesome Intelligence, consisted of these functional areas:
Audiences: let users browse research-based youth personas filtered by age and gender, view each persona's passion points, media presence, and estimated reach, and create custom audiences by adding or removing interests and demographics, with reach updating in real time
Strategies: translated a selected persona into channel recommendations across CTV, mobile, desktop, YouTube, gaming, and creators, with per-channel controls to tune the approach
Media: connected channel selections to actual available inventory across those channels
Campaigns: provided a live view of active campaigns with impression pacing, engagement rate, clicks, views, VCR, and cost
Outcomes: surfaced brand lift studies, sentiment analysis, and other results
Within six months of my joining, a demoable version was built and presented to major clients in the US and UK. The audience module included over a dozen research-based youth personas, each with age profiles, media presence breakdowns, fandom maps, and reach estimates, and generated significant new pipeline in partnership conversations with clients who had previously seen SuperAwesome primarily as an inventory source.
The engineering and design work to bring the product to its final form was done by the product team, led by a tenured and talented PM who skillfully executed on the foundation we had established together.