Roles
Design Manager
Senior Interactive Designer
Tools
Adobe Creative Suite
Celtra
Figma
An internal creative team that designed and developed high-quality, interactive brand experiences to run across VICE’s owned and operated sites.
The Ad Studio designs and builds custom display experiences for brands and publishers advertising on VICE. These experiences offered more awareness and deeper engagement than standard ad creative.
A non-linear design process that limited growth
Key insights
vendor submitted campaigns that failed without internal support
average build time for custom display ads from external vendors
vendor campaigns that triggered manual QA or rewrites
A suite of formats for branded storytelling
The Ad Studio introduced a suite of ad product formats and experiences to develop a design process that scales—rooted in editorial principles, flexible for branded storytelling. It supported rapid content assembly, clear UX standards, and consistent partner branding across regions.
Before The Ad Studio
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Required to use external vendors with long lead times
❌
No opportunity to sell added media effectively
❌
Forced to use standard display ad formats
After The Ad Studio
✅
Internal design team create pitches and builds in hours, not days
✅
Sales teams confidently offered media packages to close deals
✅
Custom ad experiences were unique to Vice's platform
We created a modular design system that enabled teams to produce high-volume, brand-consistent campaigns with minimal effort. The platform scaled effortlessly from one-off activations to global rollouts, empowering creatives to focus on storytelling—not formatting.
✅
Reusable components streamlined production and reduced duplicate design work across campaigns.
✅
Responsive templates ensured consistency across formats, from mobile stories to widescreen placements.
✅
Localization-ready layouts enabled rapid adaptation for regional markets without custom redesigns.
✅
Integrated workflows allowed editors and producers to launch creative faster, with fewer handoffs.
Brand pitch decks detailed the creative concept along with a storyboard of the execution to ensure stakeholder alignment.
Users would experience ads as they scrolled through the content they were already viewing, guaranteeing engagement.
Full Screen
Half Screen
Adhesion
Ad experiences were offered in a range of custom display formats, as well as standard ad sizes.
Building out The Ad Studio and our family of ad products was a boon for VICE. Not only did they deliver markedly higher engagement and conversions than standard display media, we also introduced a new revenue stream, generating an average of $5.2 million per year.
👀
average user engagement with custom display media built by The Ad Studio
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clickthrough rate for custom display media built by The Ad Studio
💰
average annual revenue from The Ad Studio alone
We applied our learnings to internal tools, streamlining workflows for both branded and editorial stakeholders. These systems helped other teams prototype faster, stay visually consistent, and reduce development cycles.
✅
Component reuse increased creative velocity and reduced production overhead.
✅
Teams embraced the system quickly thanks to familiar workflows and flexible templates.
⚠️
Earlier integration of performance analytics could have informed design decisions sooner.
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Onboarding for non-designers could be more robust to ensure broader adoption across roles.
