Designing the Future: Revolution at American Express
The AICO - AI Creative Optimizer was envisioned to transform the creatives review process at American Express.
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The AICO - AI Creative Optimizer was envisioned to transform the creatives review process at American Express. 〰️
Tackled the challenge of reimagining the campaign marketing material/collateral’s review/approval process at American Express. The focus was on creating an intuitive, efficient system for marketers to submit their creatives for approval. The project involved deep user research to understand the pain points in the existing process. I dove into the world of our marketers to understand their day-to-day, knowing that the best solutions come from real problems.
Introduction: A UX Challenge Accepted
Crafting the Solution:
Armed with insights and a clear goal, I began designing. The AICO AI Creative Optimizer was not just another tool – it was the bridge between our marketers and faster, error-free launches.
Understanding the Problem:
The review process was slow, inconsistent, and it was eating into AMEX launch times. The teams needed a solution that was not just good – it had to be great.
Roles and Responsibilities
As the lead UX Designer, I was the strategist plotting the course and the artisan crafting every detail:
Conducting deep-dive research sessions to understand the minutiae of the marketers' challenges.
Designing with an eye for both aesthetic appeal and functional excellence.
Orchestrating a collaboration symphony with stakeholders across various departments.
Design Process
Design is user empathy in action
That's the mantra I followed, aiming to turn complex tasks into simple solutions.
I began with an in-depth qualitative analysis, engaging with marketers to extract nuanced insights into their daily challenges. This phase informed her design decisions, ensuring a user-centric approach.
Ideation & Conceptualization: I translated research insights into tangible design concepts, meticulously sketching wireframes and mapping user flows. Each iteration brought a clearer focus on reducing complexity and enhancing usability.
Prototyping & Testing: Interactive prototypes were crafted using advanced design tools, aligning with the AMEX design language. Rigorous usability testing followed, where each interaction was scrutinized and refined for simplicity and efficiency.
Implementation & Collaboration: My role extended to guiding a junior designer, ensuring design coherence. She liaised with brand and compliance teams to ensure that every design element met stringent standards.
Iteration & Refinement: The design was an evolving narrative, with my receptiveness to feedback driving multiple iterations, each improving on the last, until the user experience was seamless.
Empathy Map
Addressing the most pressing challenges faced by Marketers :
Tedious Review Process: Marketers were burdened by a cumbersome review process that was time-consuming and prone to human error, especially when dealing with large volumes of content like terms and conditions.
Inconsistent Editing Practices: Each team had their own approach to editing presentations, leading to inconsistencies and inefficiencies in the review process.
Delayed Publishing: The existing system led to significant delays in publishing marketing materials, which in turn affected campaign launches and overall marketing agility.
Brand and Compliance Challenges: Ensuring that all marketing materials met AMEX’s strict brand and compliance guidelines was an arduous task that the existing process struggled to manage efficiently.
Reading between the lines - Brand review is optional so sometimes marketer completely skip this step and that can impact the brand image if the guideline, voice, tone, icons etc is not properly followed by agency and creatives gets published.
Journey Map
Covered detailed touchpoints of the Marketers Journey from getting the brief of campaign details to tracking of the result of performance of campaign.
The enter and engage part of the journey had lot of back and forth communication of small issues that could be easily resolved by adding AI.
Navigating Change: From Review Tool to AI Innovation at American Express
Initial Motivation: Tackling Inconsistencies
Our journey began with a clear objective: to address the inconsistencies plaguing the marketing teams at American Express. The teams, while adept at using PowerPoint for their marketing creatives, had developed varied styles of editing and presenting content. Despite initial training on standard submission procedures, comfort in individual methodologies led to a lack of uniformity, especially noticeable when reviewer personnel changed. This resulted in significant delays in the approval process, impacting our campaign timelines.
Review Tool: The First Step
Recognizing these challenges, our first instinct was to develop a review tool. This tool aimed to standardize the review process, providing a uniform platform for submissions and evaluations. The goal was to minimize inconsistencies and streamline the approval workflow, ensuring a more efficient process regardless of personnel changes among reviewers.
A Strategic Pivot: Embracing AI for Greater Impact
However, as we delved deeper into the problem, it became evident that a review tool, while helpful, wouldn’t fully capitalize on the opportunity to enhance our processes. In discussions with product managers, bolstered by insights from our journey and empathy maps, we realized the potential of AI. By adopting an AI-driven approach, we could not only standardize the review process but also automate it, significantly reducing development time and enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of our marketing operations.
AI Solution: A Leap Towards Futuristic Efficiency
The shift to an AI tool marked a significant leap in our approach. This solution was designed to automatically detect and address the inconsistencies in creative submissions, providing real-time feedback and drastically reducing delays. It was a move from simply managing the process to transforming it, leveraging technology to redefine our marketing review workflow.
Why AI
Enhanced Accuracy in Brand Compliance: AI algorithms can meticulously scan creative materials for adherence to brand guidelines, ensuring consistent branding across all marketing collateral.
Rapid Content Review: The AI tool can quickly process and review large volumes of content, significantly reducing the time taken for manual reviews.
Error Reduction: By automating the review process, AI minimizes the chances of human error in content approval, leading to more reliable and accurate outcomes.
Efficient Alignment with Approved Content: AI can cross-reference creatives with previously approved materials, ensuring new content is in alignment with established standards.
Scalability: AI capabilities enable the tool to handle increasing volumes of content without a corresponding increase in review time or resources.
Real-time Feedback: Marketers receive immediate feedback on their creatives, allowing for swift revisions and adjustments as needed.
Data-driven Insights: AI can provide valuable insights into common compliance issues, helping marketers understand and avoid frequent branding mistakes.
Cost Efficiency: By streamlining the review process, the AI tool reduces the labor and time costs associated with manual reviews.
Improved Collaboration: The tool can facilitate better collaboration between marketing teams and compliance departments, ensuring smoother communication and quicker resolution of issues.
Increased Creative Output: With faster approval times, marketers can produce and launch campaigns more rapidly, increasing the overall creative output and marketing agility.
User Flow - AICO tool
DESIGNS
AI Creative Optimizer
AICO LANDING PAGE
The page offers a choice between 'Brand Review' and 'MCR Review,' each leading to further tailored options like product type, channel, communication type, and campaign start/end date. This user-centric design simplifies the input process, culminating in an easy file upload feature, symbolizing efficiency and innovation in the creative review workflow.
UPLOAD FILE SCREENS
SCAN PAGE
RESULT PAGES
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work:
I didn't do it alone. Working with product team, designers, marketing team, developers, brand experts, and compliance teams, we made sure AICO was a tool everyone could rely on.
TOOLS: Figma, Miro, Sketch, Adobe XD
TEAM :Kamila Aquino (Sr. Product owner), Gauri alate (UX Designer), Justin greenfield(Product Manager), Eric(Director), Ahmad Eng Director), srinivas(Engineer) and more.
The Result: A Game-Changer
"As a marketer at American Express, Our eagerness to test varied imagery and copy in our campaigns was consistently curtailed by the lengthy review process. This not only constrained our creative freedom but also had a tangible impact on the effectiveness of our campaigns. The direct correlation between this bottleneck and our campaign success was unmistakable. Thanks to the streamlined review process introduced by UX team, we can now rapidly iterate on our creative ideas, significantly boosting our campaigns' performance."
— AMEX Marketing team
