Amazon Interactive Tablet Campaigns (2012 - 2016)
Bringing exceptional ad experiences to Kindle Fire Tablets
Role: Design Lead (User Experience & Visual Design), Subject-Matter Expert, Design Bar-Raiser
*Sensitive material has been redacted
From 2012 to 2016, I was a core part of the team that built the profit engine that is Amazon Advertising today. In these early years, the goal was to craft highly-polished experiences of exceptional quality in order to gain customer trust and demonstrate the benefits of advertising on Amazon to brands globally.
A large part of this effort was developing ad experiences for the Kindle (Ultimately named “Kindle with Special Offers” / “KSO”). These would be presented on device lock-screens when turned on. As such, the quality bar was extremely high. These had to be ads that people would enjoy seeing.
From bespoke design to a system of scalable templates
In the beginning, the goal centered on developing custom UX experiences (shown above) tailored to the needs of each brand or product. This highlighted the quality and flexibility of the Fire Tablet as a stand-alone ad platform.
As the program developed and learnings were applied, the core of the offerings became a system of templates that offered the flexibility to suit 90% of customer requests. These could be re-skinned entirely to give the appearance of a bespoke creation. This system allowed for massive scale of the KSO program.
A legacy of business success
To say that these brand stores exceeded expectations would be an understatement. They were a huge part of why Amazon Advertising was able to grow to the behemoth that is today. Thousands of brands joined the program, resulting in billions of dollars in profit. They were the force behind the shift in perception of Amazon from “just a retail site” to a fundamental part of the global advertising landscape.