Initially, not much direction was provided. The client provided a very rough mockup to show the elements they wanted in their ad units: Client Logo, Product Name, Product Image, Regular Price with strike-through, Sale Price, Tag with Percent Discount, and CTA.
The client indicated that they would want the custom layouts to follow the look and feel of their recently deployed ads. To get a better sense of what they were looking for, I retrieved some current ad samples from an ad aggregating showcase site. I felt the samples communicated the brand very successfully. At this point I knew that I wanted to communicate their brand through high-contrast and lively visuals with an authoritative modern typeface.
The client had provided a sample of their dynamic product feed for us. When I went in to review it, I saw that the product photography of their destinations was beautiful and well-produced images of their resort locations. I also noticed it was all the same aspect, which is key for a standardized look and feel.
Once I verified the client’s photography was all horizontal aspect, I put together a quick updated mockup to show the direction I thought would serve them best: maximize their beautiful product photography by shifting the ads to a horizontal aspect. They agreed.
I based my sketch on the sample ads I retrieved from the ad showcase site and display ad examples from the client’s Brand Marketing guide. Satisfied with the sketched layout, I produced the polished draft in Photoshop. While I felt I nailed most of the elements of the client’s look and feel, I felt I had to refine the Regular Price / Sale Price lockup. To enable a more dynamic type strategy, I shifted fonts to Oswald which allowed me a broader palette of type weights to used across the ad’s product data elements.
Concurrently with refining the look and feel of the ad layout, I led the discussion with the account manager and their feed technical specialist regarding how the client could strategize getting additional dynamic data into their dynamic ad units. Since there is a limited set of dynamic attributes which we’re allowed to map to with this product, a technique our team often recommends is using a unique character to separate additional text from an existing column in their feed. Then, we use JavaScript within the ads use to split the text at that specific character, and then populate it into the appropriate dynamic fields.
To get these concepts across, I illustrated this information graphic based upon the client’s creative and product feed data. The client absolutely understood how to text-split, based upon their feedback on the infographic. In the end, they opting for a more simple approach for this custom layout request, advising us that they would text-split on the next request.
This is the final 12-unit Dynamic ad set.