Google Store
CONCEPTING / ART DIRECTION / TECH INNOVATION
Essence and Google Store were responsible for over $1B in direct sales over one year. Our flexible programmatic has thousands of ads in market in 13 countries. Utilizing our proprietary dynamic templates, we can play videos, animate statics and update offers, prices and images in ads in minutes instead of weeks.
Situation:
In 2015 Google Store came to our creative group in Seattle. They asked what we could do to improve the delivery of their roughly 10 product ads/month for phones and other products.
Task:
It was my responsibility to ideate and present the solutions. Days before the meeting, the dev lead, and others had brainstormed a presentation of roughly 10 major ideas that could make their difficult Photoshop to HTML to trafficking simple and powerful. We also developed design adaptations with better layouts with more white space, an intelligent grid, tighter font controls, and cool 3D product animations that we would build in Cinema 4D. And we added unasked for digital brand guidelines.
Action:
At the core of my presentation was how we would create beautiful dynamic, generic, templates in DCS. The templates would be coded to refer to a database. In that database each row would be an ad, each column would be a feature and a sheet would be a campaign. Then the trafficked ads would refer to this locked-down database to find its live elements. Utilizing our proprietary dynamic templates, we would control videos, backgrounds, fonts, animations, photos, play SVG animations, CTAs, links, animate statics…everything. Google loved the presentation but didn’t believe that it would work.
Result:
At this moment my flexible programmatic ads now have thousands of iterations in market, selling over 30 products, in 13 countries. All done with a team of 6. Through these ads alone Google Store sold over $21B in direct sales in 2023, up from $1.6M in 2015. The most powerful element though, that we didn’t realize at the time was that once an ad was trafficked we could update offers, prices, and images in any ad in minutes instead of weeks. All of a sudden Google could run real-time testing and price changes, just leaving the ads in market while avoiding trafficking headaches.