SAMSUNG

Interactive TV

As Samsung pushed into the Ad business, we found many areas of digital TV advertisement that lacked far behind its web equivalents. In this, we found an opportunity to join the Interactive Advertising Bureau as a founding member of the Advanced TV Committee and propose new advertising opportunities for connected TVs.

Challenges

SmartTVs were by definition devices connected to the internet, but the processing power that was built-in had traditionally been minimal. As a response to new set-top boxes, Samsung had started supercharging our TVs, but this new power was still underutilized. Many of our advertising partners had not taken advantage of our modern operating systems and the abilities that came with it, and the results were an Ad ecosystem littered with cookie-cutter experiences.

Our team also forged new partnerships with data mining teams within Samsung as well as external partners to leverage Automatic Content Recognition, a technology that gave us the ability to enhance the normal TV viewing experience. Despite having these features available in-house, our partners had rarely leveraged them in a beneficial way for our consumers.

Solution

By leveraging our teams' existing knowledge of the IAB, programmatic Ads, and the TV industry we identified several areas where we could improve the user experience on our products while also creating the basis for new IAB standards. We looked to leverage new technology to enhance Ad and TV viewing experiances, use Ads as a means of recommendations within our native TV UI, and leveraging web technologies to create bespoke full-bleed Ad apps.

Our technology allowed us to detect content and interject supplementary information into the TV viewing experiance. We developed concepts around customizing linear TV by swapping out irrelevant Ads for ones that users would be more receptive to, as well as providing additional content that helped make Ads more actionable for consumers. We called these concepts and proposals Ad Enhancements.

I worked with the TV UI design studio in Korea to help hone our future TV UI for our 2016 TVs. As a key stakeholder, I helped drive the company to standardize how we designed future iterations of the UI by creating a design system to build on. This design system leveraged parallels in the Ad ecosystem that we were able to leverage to create new inventory on our devices while also enhancing the overall experience our consumers had.

I worked with partners and agencies to develop next generation experiances. Our Samsung SmartTVs had brains that were the equivalent of smartphones, and we used this horsepower to develop fully interactive Ad experiences in the form of micro-sites or mini-apps.

Role

I was the head of design for Samsung Ads and general manager of a SWAT team created to develop and execute new concepts. I led a multidisciplinary team of one product manager, three engineers, and four designers. I led and conducted high-level project evaluations, research, and strategy work and led the team in architecting the concepts. I was responsible for the information architecture and the viability of our concepts and worked with my team to build the designs and prototypes. I presented our work to C-level execs at partner companies and internal executives, including the EVP of Samsung VD.