Unicast Ad Platform - solving online ad campaign management issues
Unicast was a largely publisher-focused ad server, which successfully managed complex rich media units such as full page takeovers and interactive video units for the likes of ABC, NBC, Viacom, Microsoft, AOL, and other major internet pubs.
I was the product lead for the platform as well as the client-side ad creation tools, and product-managed the work of multiple development teams.
Below are some platform refinements that improved campaign management efficiency as well as the day-to-day experience of all platform users.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
PRODUCT DESIGN
USER RESEARCH
MANAGEMENT
One of the core problems that initially impacted the site's efficiency was the use of hierarchical dropdown menus as the sole navigation for finding campaigns. This required users to leverage their own knowledge of entities in the system - agencies, advertisers, and campaigns - and their relation to each other in order to find what they were looking for.
The first thing we added was a top-level search, which let you skip the hierarchical selection if you knew what you were looking for, assuming the search term wasn't broad enough to apply to a large number of items.
Next we added more nuanced search capabilities, allowing users to find items they were looking for by any number of different attributes.
Finally, given campaign managers are repeatedly working with the same entities in the system at a given time, we implemented a history feature, to surface the most recently viewed campaigns, placements and creatives, eliminating the need to do any searching for a recently accessed item.
Another issue faced by campaign managers was the need to manually stay on top of campaign delivery pacing. Ad views are generally intended to be delivered in large numbers (eg thousands or millions of views) over extended periods of times (eg weeks or months). Part of a campaign manager's job is to ensure that a campaign is on target to deliver the right number of impression in the right timeframe. If only the current impressions and date range are shown, the work of understanding the delivery is on the campaign manager rather than the system.
To help here, we added color-coded projected impression information, calculated by the system. At a glance, a campaign manager can see if a campaign will over or under-deliver based on current pacing, and by how much.
In addition, we designed a feature that would give a campaign manager a leg up in responding to campaign pacing issues - the system allowed a user to easily view all the placements on the publisher (to understand if it is a publisher-wide issue or a placement-specific one), and could auto-generate the beginning of an email to the publisher to save the campaign manager the time needed to look up the right publisher email address and draft a suitable message.
A third problem related to approval of the high-impact rich media units that Unicast specialized in, which included units like full page takeovers. When these units were built in the platform and sent for approval, publisher were either underwhelmed by the review of a standalone unit, or didn't understand the context in which it would run. Truth be told, this was somewhat of a problem even for our internal ad developers.
The solution to this problem was to support the creation of a library of publisher background images. Using a simple editing interface, a platform user could load a screenshot of a publisher page, and then position the ad on top of it.
This allowed publishers to easily see how an ad would appear in the page, and it even allowed our internal staff to provide a preview that matched the current look of the publisher's site up to the day or even the hour.