Programs and Scale

Event Quality Assurance

Clients: P&G, Unilever, Reckitt and many more

Locale: US, CA, MX, DE, FR, IT, ES, UK, IN, JP, AU

Involvement: Program Management, QA

Background

Prime Day and Black Friday are Amazon’s biggest shopping events of the year and millions of customers are browsing for deals, so - as always - Amazon wanted to provide the best possible shopping experience for their customers. At Amazon Ads this meant that our ad creatives had to be event guideline conform and flawless in execution.

Challenge

Launching 3000+ ads in 11 countries using 6 languages, created by an army of internal designers across the globe with a definite event deadline, leaves too much room for error to just use business as usual workflows.

Solution - Creative Ad QA program

We set up a global Creative Quality Assurance program that started preparations over 6 months before the events in order to align with internal and external partners on all dependencies, workflows and timings. Ad Policy, Product, QA, Ad Ops, Sales, Account Management, Design, Amazon Prime, Retail, Legal and many more teams had to have a global agreement on roles and responsibilities. For Advertising Design this meant to know all the details of the Prime Day event design style guide that changed every year, to set up and be aware of all the timings and workflows, which tools to use and how to manage the huge amount of creative production while still being able to deliver standard business as usual campaigns at the same time.

My role as the appointed EU Program Manager for creative QA was to create and set up said guidelines, tools, timings and workflows and to train and educate 100+ global Designers and other internal teams to be ready to deliver 3000+ ad banners per event. I was then part of the leadership team to review these ads for correct use of copy, customer experience and artwork before launch. Results were reported weekly at VP, Director and group levels against goals for accuracy, quality and efficiency.

Prime Day offer banners for mobile and desktop following a specific style guide

Results

In three consecutive years I was leading the program for EU, we had zero defects of UX and ensured the standards of ad creative work was as high as possible. While the production volume grew each year by 30% the efficiency increased by 39% and creative First Pass Yield rate improved by 16% YoY.

PanEU5 LEGO campaign

Client: LEGO

Locale: DE, UK, FR, IT, ES

Involvement: Art Direction, Visual Design, Interactive Design and Development

Background

LEGO wanted to launch their new LEGO Duplo and LEGO Juniors range which included 18 different products and was targeted to girls and boys with individual ad motifs.

Challenge

5 locales (DE, UK, FR, IT, ES) times 18 products times 2 ranges times 2 motives times 3 platforms (Mobile, Desktop, Tablet) equals 848 ad units that needed to be produced. On top the timing was extremely tight as the campaign was booked 1 month before launch.

Solution - Scalable creative smart templates

Using variables in Photoshop I’ve created smart templates that could easily be handed over to other locales and designers to support me in this colossal task. Since the motifs stayed the same across locales, I created one set with all formats for all platforms and took over coordination and Art Direction of 7 other designers to complete the rest. Being an Interactive Designer I was also responsible for designing and developing the animated and interactive Adobe Flash formats.

Mobile, Desktop and Tablet format templates for both product lines

Results

We received very positive internal and client feedback for the great quality of work and the quick turnaround for an on-time campaign start and execution. Banners performed way above benchmarks and product sales exceeded the client’s goals.