Creative lead for scale-up SaaS company AdRoll

As a pioneer in the ad retargeting space, AdRoll (now NextRoll) set out to democratize advertising technology, bringing sophisticated tools to small and medium-sized businesses to help them dramatically increase their return on marketing spend while improving online conversions. I joined the team in early 2012 as they were looking to scale operations and go global with their sights on increasing market share and delivering a cutting-edge SaaS platform for their B2B customers.

With a huge challenge came a huge opportunity, to evolve a brand and design assets and campaigns that would support an organization and reach sales objectives as it grew over the next four years from 50 employees with 4,000 customers to more than 500 employees across eight global offices and 20,000 customers.

What to do when your company is growing faster than your marketing?

When I joined AdRoll I was the only designer on our five person marketing team. The company was beginning to show its rocket ship growth potential and the rapidly expanding sales team was hungry for materials to pitch to leads. And as an ad tech company you'd think our own display ad campaigns were at the top of their game, right? Wrong. That had to change. My first objective was to design a compelling one-pager extolling the features and benefits of our product, and work with sales leads in each vertical to customize it to their needs. With the sales team armed and ready, I then focused my efforts on creating high-performing display ads to drive our demand gen initiatives. Ongoing rounds of A/B testing and optimization of design and copy led to above industry average CTR and coupled with the power of our own retargeting product we consistently generated 10x ROAS. And the ads looked just as good as they worked.

Once the optimized digital campaigns increased traffic to our website we saw the opportunity to amplify their impact by revamping the site to target new international markets and reflect our expanded product offering. Enter, the website redesign.

Shaping the face of the company

There aren't many initiatives more daunting for any fast-growing company than tackling a website redesign. It's like changing the tires on a formula one car driving at top speed. It takes planning and flawless execution. But that's what needed to be done so I ran point establishing the information architecture with a ground-up redesign from research to wireframing. I vetted agencies to help us with the enormous amount of design work ahead, because while we would have loved to do everything in-house, we had other cars to steer on the track as well. The end result was a beautified site, localized for eight languages, optimized for conversions, experimentation, and simplified content management. With over 200,000 monthly unique visitors, the success of the company relied on the effectiveness of the site at acquiring new customers through free trial signups. The site delivered better results than expected which was validation for the considerable time and effort of the project.

Animating the customer experience

Introducing animated graphics is an engaging way to quickly and simply communicate features and benefits to a site visitor which is why we chose to use them throughout the new design of the site. They conveyed information while simultaneously supporting the playful nature of the AdRoll brand.

Guiding the brand

One of my most fulfilling responsibilities at AdRoll was to maintain the brand identity of the company. That involved ongoing assessment of brand impact and discovering areas to improve the aesthetics and effectiveness of the design and implementation of assets, sales materials, templates, and every single piece of brand collateral used within the company and beyond. I introduced digital asset management solutions and workflows to ensure brand compliance and reduce wasted time and effort locating and creating assets and materials within the design team and across the growing organization. I enjoyed sitting down with the founders for brand workshops to codify the voice, values, and mission of the company, and translating their vision into a design system that shaped every aspect of communication between the Rollers and externally to prospects and customers.