Overview

In August 2020, Macy’s department store had launched their first in-house digital advertising team known as Macy’s Media Network (MMN). By the end of the quarter, the company generated $35M on site advertisement. The goal of the project was to expand monetization efforts to support additional revenue. The problem is that by including too many advertisements on site, it may deter the customer experience. The solution was to provide additional advertising off site within e-mails as an additional placement to drive traffic and conversion.

Team

Creative Director, Chris Hanigan

Creative Manager, Dennis Yu

Designer, Julia Kim

Initial Research

During the initial stages of this project, I first worked directly with the director of partnerships to gain insight on the successes of on-site advertising.

By understanding its current value to the company and its client participation rate, I would be able to provide better design solutions.

Since the quarter had just ended, I wanted to leverage the data for the most current and accurate information before concepting.

Competitive Research

Since I had insight on what is performing in-house. I wanted to expand my research to other competitors to see how sponsored ads were implemented on other e-mail platforms.

• All examples that I have found were editorial based content from newsletters.

• The advertising for the mobile units did not have design consistency.

• The height of the banners were smaller than 300px per unit.

Low-Fidelity

Based on another retailer that I found (Uniqlo) that has multiple partnerships during a given quarter, I felt confident on leveraging this example to help streamline both design and production process.

• The benefit of a square asset is that it can be leveraged from social media assets.

• Copy can be leveraged within the social unit and pasted text directly into the template.

Feedback

Though the media team was happy with the wireframe, the marketing team wanted to ensure the content had cohesive messaging.

With the creative director and designer, we were able to leverage partnership e-mails that were successful launched.

Learnings

Based on feedback, I realized that the current template did not need the Macy’s logo since it was already in the header.

There were established design systems in place and are unable to break guidelines.

Findings

As I implement revised banners into the actual archived emails, I quickly realized that the banners were not proportionate to the content.

With the help from the designer in the experience team, I was able to provide two solutions for our partners. Larger banners for promotional content and smaller versions for operational e-mails.

Results

With the help from a creative director and designer on the site experience team, I was able to produce a vendor guide for sponsored ads for e-mail content to help grow the media business for additional revenue.