Product Development: The "Promosphere"

Background:  When the new website launched, some ad inventory that was available on the old site went away with the new design. It became important for us to create space on the site for house initiatives, since surplus inventory that used to go to house ads was greatly reduced. Over the course of several months, we executed on requests for several new promotional spaces, which were intended for house messaging only. Some of these promotional areas were hard coded, some were CMS-managed, and some were managed with DFP. The product development team decided to create some rules of engagement for the Marketing, Ad Sales, and Consumer Revenue teams so that everyone would be on the same page in terms of how, when, and why to use each space. We called this universe of promotional spaces "The Promosphere". 

Project requirements:

• Educate stakeholders on the promotional spaces available to them, and the requirements for each
• Deputize the head of Marketing to "own" the Promosphere

Our approach:  We met as a group to map out the possible combinations of promotion on site, and the technical features of each. We then created this presentation as well as some supporting spec documents to arm the marketing and ad ops stakeholders with. 

Result: We "taught a man to fish" and turned over the keys to something the Product Development team used to manage, freeing us up to utilize resources on other projects. 

My role: 

• Stakeholder interviews
• Project management
• Quality Assurance

The team: 

• Jon Akland: UX/Design 
• Emily Waggoner: UX/Design 
• Kyle Gibson: Ad Operations
• David Sweeney: Marketing lead