Ad Format
Timeline
2026.05 - Present
Team
1 Designer, 1 PM, 4 SDE
Company
NewsBreak, Monetization
Role
Research, Design, Build
Overview
In September 2025, I moved from the Newsletter team to Monetization, where I began designing ad experiences across NewsBreak. My focus was to explore and iterate on new ad formats—improving ad performance while minimizing disruption to the content experience.
Learning from the Market
NewsBreak’s ad product was evolving quickly. To understand what makes an ad experience effective, I started by studying how mature platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn approached advertising.
But our references were scattered across different places and difficult to reuse. So I built a Library to organize ad formats, interaction patterns, and design inspirations from across the market—turning one-off observations into something the team could use in future design and experimentation.
Static screenshots were not enough to understand how these experiences actually worked.
To study animation and interaction in more detail, I built a lightweight video analysis tool that let us slow down playback and mark the start and end of transitions. This made it much easier to break down motion patterns from other products and apply those learnings to our own explorations.
Turning Learnings into a System
Every platform has its own audience and content ecosystem, so simply copying patterns from mature products would not guarantee the same results.
Instead of only documenting experiment outcomes, I began capturing the thinking behind each iteration: what changed, why it might work, and what we learned.
Over time, these validated learnings became inputs for the next round of design, turning one-off experiments into a more repeatable process.
Result
What started as a way to organize references gradually became a more systematic way for us to explore, evaluate, and iterate on ad experiences.
With shared patterns, tools, and experiment learnings, we were able to move faster, launch more ad formats, support a broader range of advertiser needs, and continue improving performance without making the content experience more disruptive.
