Google Ads
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2022 – 2024
A multi-year innovation sprint exploring how AI, interactivity, and editorial storytelling could transform Google Search advertising from interruption into experience.
Google Search ads have been fundamentally the same for years — text links, a shopping carousel, maybe an image. The challenge Huge was brought in to address: what happens when AI, interactivity, and richer media formats enter the picture? Should Google preserve its objectivity or should advertisers have platform to showcase their brand? Where does user agency fit in? Can things be immersive without feeling manipulative? These are questions I still ask myself.
Over two years, I led a series of focused design sprints — each exploring a different lever. Sometimes the focus was progressive disclosure and interaction patterns. Other times, it was GenAI-powered personalization or new commercial surfaces for indirect search intent. Working within the Google's ad parameters and our own ethical framework, our team sought to define how ads might evolve along with advancing technology in the digital landscape.
The insight: advertisers have a lot to say, but search ad formats give them almost no space to say it. The Storytelling Scroll format reimagines the ad unit as a horizontally progressive narrative — each interaction unlocking a new content layer, from brand headline to product features to a targeted CTA.
We explored this across multiple verticals — Nike running shoes, Experian car insurance — demonstrating how the format scales across different advertiser types and commercial intents.
One of the most forward-looking concepts in the sprint: what if a user could configure a product entirely within the ad unit, before ever leaving Google Search?
The Fitbit Sense 2 concept allowed users to swap watch bands, backgrounds, and faces — seeing their customized product in real time, with a contextual buy CTA that reflected their selections. This was designed as a proof of concept for how GenAI could enable truly personalized ad creative at scale.
Two complementary concepts exploring how AI could help users navigate complex or ambiguous search queries — reducing friction and surfacing more commercially relevant results for advertisers.
Smart Guides introduced a step-by-step discovery flow for high-consideration searches like travel — progressively refining results through contextual questions rather than requiring users to re-query.
Smart Filters reimagined product attribute filtering as a visually-driven, AI-assisted interface — letting users filter by color, mood, or use case in a way that felt like browsing a curated storefront, not operating a faceted search.
Smart Guides
Smart Filters
Working inside Google's constraints is a design exercise unlike almost any other. Every decision exists in tension: more expressive ads risk degrading the search experience; too conservative and you haven't moved anything forward.
The most valuable skill I developed across these sprints was learning to hold both perspectives simultaneously — to design for the advertiser's ambition while genuinely protecting the user's trust. The best formats we created felt less like ads and more like features.
I also learned that at this scale, design influence is as important as design execution. Many of these concepts were shared with Google's internal product teams, surfaced in planning conversations, and used to socialize new format directions that their teams then built toward. The output wasn't always a shipped feature — sometimes it was a shifted conversation.