Making Headlines at The Wall Street Journal
Sector: Finance, Retail, Luxury
Role: Ad Designer and Builder
Tools: Adobe Photoshop, Celtra
Developing a Hero ad unit
As Senior Interactive Designer I lead initial designs of standard ad units for The Wall Street Journal’s Ad Innovation team, such as the “Headline Hero”, which allows clients to feature multiple sections of content that can work as a whole and be interactive in their own individual manner at the same time.
The beginnings of development for the “Headline Hero” ad unit came from client requests to develop an experience that could serve multiple pieces of content for desktop viewers. I tested out different layouts to see how content was best displayed without looking overcrowded or being too disruptive if animated.
Client Application
Once the Ad Innovation team came to a concensus on best practices for Headline Hero ad units, I began to design layouts for customers who sought such rich media builds for their own campaigns. Such ad units were developed to meet client KPIs as best as possible and were tracked in various ways on each section to ensure the most pertinent analytics could be gathered from each campaign.
Below are more examples of “Headline Hero” ad experiences I designed and developed in Celtra’s rich media platform over my tenure with the Ad Innovation team at The Wall Street Journal.
Working alongside the Ad Innovation team, I was able to land on a style that remained visually related to overall campaign or brand. We tested and found that 3 to 4 pieces of content yielded better engagement results, driving up consumbtion tim and CTR over standard units with one piece of content. “Headline Hero” ad units were designed to be responsive across both desktop and mobile devices. While all content remained within the ad unit frame on larger monitors, on a mobile Dow Jones website the content would switch to a gallery format the maintain the ad’s interactivity.
Internal Teamwork
Many “Headline Hero” ad units were developed alongside Events and Marketing teams at The Wall Street Journal, using assets to create experiences that served as condensed previews of the main Event landing page.
