Company
Vice Media
Role
Design Manager,
Senior Interactive Designer
Year
2018–2021
Problem
A fragmented design process blocking scale
Prior to The Ad Studio, VICE's commercial sales teams were reliant on external vendors to develop any custom brand creative that was pitched by Vice. While these ads provided users with a more interactive experience, the develop time and approval process made it difficult to recommend custom display media to our brand partners.
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
Approach
A unified system for expressive content
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
❌
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
Solution
Built for storytelling at any scale
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.
Implementation
Once the process was clearly defined, we were able to pitch and develop custom display ads from mocks to build within 1 week. This was made possible through efficient request intake and management through Asana before leveraging a suite of creative tools to build these experiences.
Task Management
Asana
Wireframes
mIRO
High-Fidelity Design
Figma
Photoshop
Development
CeLtra
Ceros
Results
Performance by numbers
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
👆
clickthrough rate for custom display media built by The Ad Studio
💰
average annual revenue from The Ad Studio alone
Takeaways
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.
⚠️
Onboarding for non-designers could be more robust to ensure broader adoption across roles.
Get in touch
Let’s talk. Whether you’re building something new or improving what’s already working, I’d love to hear about it.
Sean Finn
Product Designer
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