Beyond the banner ad: Making advertising meaningful through product design

Bill Spingarn and Leandro Lisboa share five ways the Zalando Marketing Services product design team is innovating the advertising space to meaningfully connect brands and customers.

How can a brand make its red dress stand out among the tens of thousands of red dresses in the Zalando catalogue? How can they position themselves beside market leaders to catch the eye of the customer? How can they harness the Zalando platform to grow their business in an immensely competitive market?

As its name suggests, Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS) harnesses a deep understanding of the customer to help brands create an effective marketing strategy for the Zalando platform. They deliver tailored campaigns and experiences to engage their target audience on Zalando’s app, website, social media, and influencer platform Collabary. Providing the tools behind these customer experiences (B2C), and the experience of over 2,500 brand partners (B2B), is the ZMS product design team.

“We work on two sides of the coin,” says Head of Product Design Bill Spingarn. “One side is looking at how customers receive the marketing messages and how that harmonises with the rest of their shopping experience. The other is creating an intuitive partner platform for self-service advertising campaigns and back-end operations.”

ZMS Product Design, established at the end of 2021, has matured remarkably quickly. That the team has embedded user research and content design is a testament to its scope.

How is ZMS elevating branding through product design? Read on to learn more about the team’s approach to creating meaningful connections between brands and customers.

Creative content to catch the eye

Since the inception of ZMS Product Design, the team has aimed to lead a transformative change in the advertising space with solutions that are both attractive to partners and interesting and valuable to the customers who interact with them. Thinking outside the box of the banner ad, they are working on elevating advertising with creative content.

“To grab the customer’s attention and inspire them to get closer to a brand,” says Principal Product Designer Leandro Lisboa, “we need to create compelling media formats for every touchpoint of the customer journey.”

“Banner ads can be discordant with the shopping experience as they often get added into the customer journey retroactively,” says Bill. “To evolve the experience, we had to concretely demonstrate our vision of elevated advertising to our stakeholders.”

To do this, Leandro imported his Figma design layers into Adobe After Effects and animated them into more shareable motion prototype videos, reflecting the intended user interactions. They have gained a lot of credibility, confidence, and excitement with internal stakeholders at ZMS and Zalando executives about the potential future customer experience.

“Only using static mockups in tools like Figma to express our ideas can sometimes limit the narrative of the user experience we wish to deliver,” Leandro explains. “However, designers can capitalise on methods like motion design and other animated or interactive prototype artefacts to express richer, more tangible, and more easily understood user experiences for internal stakeholders and users. This opens the doors for better collaboration.”

The space to think big

Unlocking such innovation and influence is an approach that creates ample space for ideation. Instead of working exclusively on the product roadmap and immediate product management needs, Product Designers are also encouraged to reserve ample time to work on opportunities they think are important to express. This way, the team challenges themselves to grow by working on underserved UX product strategies that will generate further business potential.

“I want our designers to feel empowered to work towards transformational change,” says Bill. “They can take the time to deeply understand and reflect on opportunities in the problem space, putting themselves in the customer’s or partner’s shoes. We invest in sketching, brainstorming, and collaboratively puzzling together the future experience.”

“In our industry, we often hear the phrase ‘design wants a seat at the table.’ When building our ZMS design team, I wanted our designers to have the mindset that they can do more.”

“We are proud to have reached the level of maturity that allows us to not only receive business requirements and apply our design methodologies day to day,” says Leandro, “but also to facilitate processes and influence strategic business decisions towards the future vision.”

“This is putting us more in the driver’s seat rather than being reactive,” Bill adds. “In our industry, we often hear the phrase ‘design wants a seat at the table.’ When building our ZMS design team, I wanted our designers to have the mindset that they can do more. They are experts in the product spaces, and it befits them to be curious and proactive about painting opportunities for the business.”

Starting with the customer

A great solution that arose from the team’s user-centric ideation approach is how they redesigned the ZMS premium brand awareness product, the Homepage Takeover.

“Working with Product Managers and Analysts across Zalando departments,” Bill explains, “we did data analysis to identify some weaker parts of how the homepage performed and some unintentional effects on customer behaviour when they visit. Combining these insights with those gathered from user research, we developed some experiments that addressed concerns around customer experience. We even went beyond to make a better performing solution for partner brands using it to advertise.”

On the partner side, the team identified a need to evolve beyond the one-size-fits-all approach of a marketing platform.

“ZMS employees, agencies, and new and experienced marketers all use our platform,” Bill explains. “Providing a single experience to these different personas was a good zero-to-one start. However, now we’re thinking about how we can serve our partners even better. A new user who doesn’t understand much strategy has different needs from someone who manages 50 partner accounts in bulk and wants greater operational efficiency. Freeing ourselves from limitations, we are rethinking our marketing toolset and its workflows to deliver transformational results that will make ZMS the marketing platform of choice for fashion brands.”

Harnessing advanced technologies

Cutting-edge technologies present even more opportunities to create meaningful connections between brands and customers. The team is looking at ways to improve the experience on both sides by integrating generative AI.

“Product design can demonstrate these opportunities very tangibly, where the potential is readily apparent. This connects much more business stakeholders than only verbal or written communication.”

One pain point for partners is writing marketing copy in the languages their advertising campaign will run in. “Some partners don’t have a lot of agency support or creative direction,” Bill explains. “Rather than a brand using the default or standard copy that can become redundant, bespoke AI-generated copy would improve their campaign presentation and ultimately more effectively shape consumer perception. We’re exploring radically evolved conceptual workflows like this that have the potential to lead to dramatic impact. We then use them to converse with our executive stakeholders, generate buy-in, and then build in small increments towards that aspirational target. Product design can demonstrate these opportunities very tangibly, where the potential is readily apparent. This connects much more business stakeholders than only verbal or written communication.”

To understand how to better target customers according to their fashion interests, the team is getting closer to the applied science discipline.

“We are becoming a part of the conversations about these intelligent systems,” says Leandro. “Here, we are talking about the back end of the exposure of advertising content to the customer. By connecting with Applied Scientists, we can better define the criteria for displaying the right content to the right customer at the right time. This goes beyond thinking about the form of our content into the fit of the content to target segments of our customer base.”

On the other side of an advertising campaign, ZMS delivers advanced data insights to partners to help them determine whether it’s worthwhile for them to keep investing.

Building bridges

“Now that our team’s influence goes beyond the ZMS unit,” says Leandro, “we as designers are taking the role of mediators and building bridges with other teams to share our perspectives, vocalise our business goals, align on overall strategic vision, and create a shared design outcome.”

ZMS are putting their heads together with other teams in our product design community to collaborate on the Zalando homepage design. “Rather than competing in silos about who can produce the coolest homepage content, we’re thinking about the space with a shared curiosity,” says Bill. “On our side, we want to create awareness of brands and spark interest in customers to dive deeper. We want to do that in a way that harmonises with other aspects of the customer journey.”

“We are now at a point where we are more able to speak the same language as other parts of the Zalando organisation,” Leandro adds. “From the customer’s perspective, it doesn’t matter which business unit creates each part of the Zalando experience. Together with other teams, we are coming up with a more holistic problem-solving process, which is really nice to see.”

To learn more about Zalando Marketing Services, head to their website. Do you have any thoughts on how to elevate branding through product design? Feel free to share them in the comments.

Next, boost your team brainstorming sessions with these creativity-sparking ideation methods from Zalando product design community members.