about the project.
Advise was envisioned as a complete ad-tech platform for broadcasters using NextGenTV/ATSC 3.0. The platform aimed to help advertisers run targeted, interactive TV ads while preserving the seamless, lean-back nature of television.
This case study focuses on the first design phase: the advertiser configuration layer and the TV rendering experience that adapts programmatic ads for the living-room screen.
With ATSC 3.0, television is moving from a one-way broadcast medium into an internet-enabled platform. This creates a new advertising opportunity: targeted, interactive, and programmatic ads on the largest screen in the home.
The product opportunity
Deliver targeted, programmatic ads on TV
1
Enable interactivity on the largest screen in the home
2
Open TV advertising to local and mid-scale businesses
3
The missing UX layer
The missing layer was experience design.
Programmatic ad systems were built for web and mobile behaviors: clicking, scrolling, tapping, and active browsing. TV behaves differently. It is passive, shared, remote-controlled, and interruption-sensitive.
problem framing.
Detached Visual layer
Hard Interruption
Dead-end Experience
Existing TV ad experiences often felt like they were borrowed from digital screens. They appeared as hard interruptions, disconnected overlays, or dead-end messages with no meaningful interaction.
Experience Gap
System Gap
Advertisers provide fixed ad creatives, often based on external/IAB standards. The product could not redesign every ad asset. It could only control how those assets were rendered, placed, blended, and interacted with on TV.
Experience Gap
System Gap
Content
TIME
USER ATTENTION
Content
Ad Break
strategic opportunity.
This product sits at the intersection of:
Broadcast infrastructure
Digital ad ecosystems
Emerging interaction paradigms on TV
product architecture.
The product was designed as a dual-sided system.
Advertiser Platform
The backend configuration layer where advertisers and media buyers set up campaigns, targeting, ad tags, and deployment logic.
TV Experience Layer
The frontend rendering and interaction layer where third-party creatives are adapted into TV-native ad experiences.
The advertiser platform defines what should run. The TV experience layer defines how it should appear and behave for viewers.
CHALLENGE
advertiser configuration layer.
The backend layer established the campaign and inventory logic needed to make ads configurable: ad spaces, targeting presets, delivery settings, key values, pricing, and protection settings.
Campaign delivery setup
Defines how the campaign is delivered: creative rotation, delivery pacing, frequency capping, child-directed ad settings, display size, and day/time rules.
Ad space creation
Creates the sellable ad space by defining ad unit details, key values, and reporting dimensions that connect backend inventory to campaign delivery.
rendering solution
PROBLEM
PROBLEM
Banner ads on TV behave like:
Foreign overlays
Hard-edged visual interruptions
Detached from content
SOLUTION
SOLUTION
Extended Panel Rendering System
Instead of displaying ads as isolated units:
Extract dominant/background color from the ad
Extend it into a full-width panel
Blend the ad into the broadcast frame
IMPACT
IMPACT
Eliminates “sticker effect”
Creates visual continuity
Preserves immersion without modifying ad creatives
The color extraction step reduced the visual clash between advertiser-supplied creative and broadcast content, making the ad feel intentionally composed rather than pasted onto the screen.
INSIGHT
When you can’t control the asset, control the environment it lives in.
interaction model: designing for a passive medium.
TV interaction is unlike web interaction that we are used to designing for. Viewers are far from the screen, using a remote, often in a shared environment. That meant every ad interaction had to be glanceable, optional, and easy to dismiss.
No touch, no cursor
D-pad navigation only
Lean-back user behavior
Constraint Space
Design Principles
Interaction must be optional
Engagement must be low-effort
Ads must never hijack attention
Constraint Space
Design Principles
Contextual Ads
Companion Ads
Interactive Ads
OUTCOME
Defined a remote-first interaction model for advertising, balancing engagement with non-intrusiveness.
system design thinking.
The goal was to define a repeatable rendering behavior that could work across many advertiser-supplied creatives.
Scalability
Works across all IAB-compliant creatives
No manual customization required
Consistency
Unified rendering behavior across formats
Adaptability
Supports multiple ad types without redesign
impact.
Product Impact
Product Impact
Defined a TV-first ad rendering and interaction model for programmatic broadcast advertising.
Business Impact
Business Impact
Created a foundation for broadcasters to package targeted, interactive ad inventory for advertisers and local businesses.
User Impact
User Impact
Reduced the perceived intrusiveness of ads by making interaction optional, remote-first, and visually integrated with content.
what makes this work distinct.
my role.
I led the product design for the first phase of Advise, working across both the enterprise advertiser platform and the consumer-facing TV experience layer.
My main contribution was defining how programmatic ad logic could translate into TV-native rendering and remote-first interaction patterns.