From approval queues to self-serve campaign management
Designing a self-serve B2B ads console that unbundled campaign launches and creative approvals for thousands of partner brands, cutting time-to-market from 5 days to 20 seconds.
In brief
Concierge Bottleneck
Every single ad campaign launch required manual platform representatives to review creatives, verify inventory availability, and send static weekly performance spreadsheets.
Unbundled Cockpit
Designed a high-density B2B campaign cockpit organized into exactly three workspace pillars: **Configure**, **Creative Verification**, and **Conversion Funnel Telemetry**.
Unlocked Capacity
Campaign time-to-market dropped from 5 days to 20 seconds. Support ticket overhead slashed by 64%, saving a projected $500K USD in multi-tool software licensing.
A revenue-ceiling problem
In enterprise retail networks, monetization is locked behind friction. Ad campaigns originally relied on a manual concierge model. To launch a single campaign, a brand manager (e.g., P&G, Unilever) had to email static creative banners and CSV placement targeting requests to an ad operations representative. This representative manually checked inventory, booked placements, reviewed creative conformity, and manually sent retrospective PDF performance summaries every week.
This manual concierge flow created major operational delays, bottlenecked campaign scaling, and capped the platform's potential ad revenue due to massive feedback loops.
"What's happening with my ad?"
— Most-asked question in brand manager usability testing
Operational unbundling
Our bet was that brand managers would enthusiastically adopt a self-serve system if it decoupled creative validation, placement selection, and campaign deployment into a streamlined, high-trust digital workflow. We designed a B2B ads cockpit configured into exactly three clear workspace tabs: **Configure**, **Creative Verification**, and **Conversion Telemetry**, entirely bypassing heavy analytical widgets to prioritize clean deployment velocity.
The campaign cockpit
The console unbundles complex campaign operations into a step-by-step progress wizard, live state machine tracking, and low-latency performance funneling:
01 / Guided Launch Wizard: Guided three-step configuration wizard. Brand managers define budgets, schedulers, and zones with immediate verification checkmarks.
02 / Creative Verification Logs: A live creative review dashboard. Brand managers track asset review states in real-time with moderator comments and inline revision uploads.
03 / Real-Time Conversion Funnel: Low-latency telemetry funnel displaying impressions, clicks, CTR, and budget burn rates for active performance control.
Placement hierarchy
To prevent banner blindness and ensure maximum campaign compliance, we designed a contextual ad selector grid. Instead of opaque, arbitrary keyword targeting selectors, the cockpit links campaigns directly to live marketplace departments (e.g., Household, Personal Care, Baby Products) and native bidding slots.
- Contextual Ad Slots: Brand managers configure placements directly against live marketplace shelves.
- Creative Review Logs: Live moderation boards show real-time comments and guidelines.
- 6-Step Telemetry: ROI tracking displaying budget burn, clicks, and impressions.
Monetisation outcome
What we didn't ship
- First-time onboarding tours. Scoped out in favor of progressive discovery and intuitive, highly scannable layout primitives.
- Cross-brand analytics. Deferred to future release cycles to protect sprint focus and guarantee complete data privacy boundaries.
- Drag-and-drop custom banner builder. Scoped out to guarantee layout compliance and preserve the visual identity of the marketplace.