Ad Creation Tool

With the mission to become the top name for business growth in SEA, the Ad team at Grab is building a self-serve ads portal (a.k.a. Unified Marketing Platform). This is a one-stop destination for all businesses and agencies to create, manage, and track campaigns in the Grab ecosphere. In this project, we will design the tool to develop ads inside the portal.

This project demonstrates the journey I'd take to understand a broad problem space such as advertisement and how I leverage various methods in gathering user insights. This is also a representative work for web-app design.
Overview
Context: design ad creation flow inside Unified Marketing Platform
‍Markets: all Grab markets (8 countries)
Duration: 1 month
Released: Q3 2022
My Contributions
• Planned and facilitated kick-off workshop
• Owned and executed end-to-end design
• Led the collaborative work with 2 other designers working in other parts of the portal
Where were we? Where are we going?
Established around 2019, Grab Ad has allowed external parties to use our mobile app as an advertising platform beyond Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and other digital channels. The Grab Ad ecosystem has evolved since then, with more and more ad types being added. However, the focus remained on the consumption end, whereas the advertiser experience was left unattended.
Until early 2022, every advertiser who wishes to do an advertisement with Grab must go through the sales team and AdOp persons to get the ad setup done. The AdOp, once receive the request, will go to an internal tool called Campaign UI to set up the ad campaign on behalf. Needless to say, this model greatly limits the growth of Grab Ad.

In 2022, the Ad Tech team revised our charter and set out a new North Star mission: "to build the leading self-service commerce marketing platform that helps all businesses connect to relevant consumers and deliver measurable impact from discovery to loyalty."
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With this mission, advertisers - be it marketing savvy ones or the less experience kampung shop owner- can now easily advertise their services directly with Grab via the Universal Marketing Platform.
HMW enable all kinds of advertiser to create ad campaign on Grab Ad platform?
Phase 1. Understanding the landscape
• Got to know how AdOp were creating ad campaigns on the existing system
• Competitor analysis for industry references
• Gathered known insights from past user research
• Facilitated a kickoff workshop to get alignment on the problems we are solving
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Phase 2. From problems to product
• Defined design/ product goal that align with the problems to be solved
• Aligned with XFN team on new creation flow
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Phase 3. From ideal to iteration
• Introduced the team to the ideal design first instead of the MVP
• Iterated backward from ideal to fit the timeline while have a clear vision of the future state
• Agile tests with AdOp and business team to get feedback
Phase Zero / Prep-work
Since I was new to the Grab Ad team, I had to spend quite a chunk of time in the beginning, familiarising myself with this part of the world by reading a lot of material. This step is essential to set up the baseline understanding.
Who are the "advertisers"? What are their advertising journeys' highlights?
Grab AdOp
Operators from Grab team who take requests from external clients to set up the ad campaigns. They are the most familiar with Grab Ad platforms but are not necessarily experts in marketing strategy. Many approval processes are needed to share creative and targeting information from the platform to their clients and stakeholders.
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Agency
‍Marketing experts who enterprises hired to specialise in running ad campaigns. Agency has a high collaborative working model with its clients, works for multiple regions and is familiar with many advertising platforms.

Enterprise
Large business who are big enough to have in-house marketing team. Enterprises have strong focus on sales and conversions and often allocate a marketing budget to multiple channels/platforms. Their ad campaigns use historical data to define benchmarks, targeting and future targeting.
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Small-medium size business owner
Small teams and less marketing-savvy but have the same emphasis on sales and conversions. Due to limited experience, these advertisers need more guidance, automated and recommended features, clean and straightforward flows, limited options, and quick wins in their advertising journey.
The construct of an ad campaign
The construction of an ad campaign on Grab Ad is pretty similar to other platforms such as Google Ad and Facebook. We try to not reinvent the wheel since most of our advertisers-clients are doing advertisements on multiple channels; the more familiar Grab Ad is, the easier they can get on board.
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Campaign - the "Why?"
Every ad campaign starts with a goal or objective, it can be to increase brand awareness or more sales. With each objective chosen, the options in Ad Groups and Ads change accordingly.
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Ad Groups - the "Who & Where?"
Advertisers will define the strategy details such as campaign audience and ad placement in this step. There can be more than one Ad Group in one campaign.
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Ads - the "What?"
This is where the ad creative is set up. This step decides the final look and feel of the ad the end-user will consume on the Grab app. Each type of ad may call for a different set of components for the visual and how it should behave post-click. There can be more than one Ad in one Ad Group.
Understanding the landscape
Step 1. Talk to the experts
By reaching out to AdOp, I got to shadow their interaction with the existing creation portal called Campaign UI.
I observed the Op setting up some test campaigns from start to end and noted down their comments along the way.
Besides AdOp, business team, product team and engineering team all have been working in this ecosystem for a while and were enthusiasts to pour out their thoughts. Finally, a teardown of Facebook Ad Manager and Google Ad Manager is a must to complete the discovery round.
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Step 2. Host a workshop
With so much raw input from everywhere, I spent the following week filtering and preparing a workshop. This workshop was a hybrid of alignment and ideation.
In the first half of the agenda, I walked 30 stakeholders through the artefacts of the existing process as well as the known pain points. This exercise gave everyone the same baseline understanding of landscape. The team had their chance to discuss and vote for the most critical problems to be solved.
From problems to product goals
With the team then well-aware on the set of problems we were solving, the workshop moved on to discuss the future. The problems gave me the starting point to define a few goals for our next product.
A self-serve advertising tool for all kinds of advertiser
As mentioned above, the mission now is that we need to extend the portal to more users beyond our internal Ad Op. Learning from user research shows that there is a gap in technical savviness between Enterprise versus SMB advertisers. However, we only have enough resources to build one single platform. Thus, the tool must provide the full marketing suite for the pros as well as give lots of guidance for the amateurs.
A tool that drives advertisers' goal
One thing that kept coming up during the workshop was the objective-focus ad campaign. This makes total sense when I refer back to our user personas. Regardless of their size and level of expertise, the advertisers do advertisements to achieve their business goal, be it to bring more sales or increase brand awareness. The flows on UMP will have objective-based navigation and recommendations so that the ad campaign has the highest chance of winning.
An advertising system with scalable structure
The existing (or we may say "old" now) ad creation system has a sub-optimal structure where ad types - ad formats - ad placements - ad experience tie together in a linear structure. Consequently, we have 12 ad templates with overlapping features and confusing naming. In fact, the industry practice calls for a much more flexible system. This situation becomes problematic for external users when onboard to Grab Ad. Building a new tool is the chance to modularise and rearrange the ad elements into the suitable IA.
From ideal to iteration
After the team had all aligned on problems and visions, it was time for me to visualise the solution. We knew it would be a long stretch to fulfil every feature in one release, so there will be phases. However, instead of only focusing on designing for MVP scope, I decided to start with the ideal version. Envisioning what the future might look like gives the stakeholders and me a better idea of scalability. We then worked backwards from there, aligning with a realistic timeline and resources to break down the ideal into smaller feasible chunks.
A few iterations later, I had a scaled-down version of ideal - now called MVP (:
Recruiting external advertisers as test participants is slow and troublesome; hence, as a quick way to validate the new design, we reached out to AdOp team to ask them to run through the flow and share their feedback. The feedback was incorporated in another iteration, then another round of review, and then the circle went on.
The design outcome
A full marketing suite with lots of guidance
While providing all the features to be on par with the industry competitors, we ensure there are proper explanations for everything. It may look like we are verbose, but it is definitely helpful for less savvy users to get on board with the new tool. With lots of hint text, guidelines, preview and forecasting widgets, the advertisers will have accurate expectations of the outcome of their ad.
Objective-based navigation and recommendations
On a high level, every ad campaign will have a somewhat similar structure where it has an objective (Why), placement (Where) and the ad itself (What). However, not all placements can achieve the same business metric, and not all ad types have the same capability. So to help guide advertisers in creating effective campaigns, we will filter the placements and ad types via the objective they can achieve. For example, when the advertiser selects Awareness objective, they will not see Search Ad option in the list but instead will be navigated through Display or Video Ad flow.
Modularise ad components
I initiated a revamp of Grab Ad Taxonomy to review the terminology and the classification of ad entities. The result is an ad system with distinct but dynamic components that can be flexibly combined in different ways to create various ad forms. This revised taxonomy also helps improve the navigation on UMP by providing a clearer hierarchy. Advertiser now has the flexibility to toggle on-off ad feature depending on their needs.
Designed and developed by khuyen le