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PayPal Personalized Ads

Challenge
Launch a PayPal ads experience on a merchant site, which doesn't compromise the merchant's brand and presents as a partnership instead of a separate interface, contributing to increased checkout conversion
Outcome
A personalized ads experience, which was piloted by Attomax on their homepage, and powered with PayPal's identity services to deliver both cold and warm start customer moments
My Role
Led design at the intersection of identity services, ads, and personalization platform while also leaning in to effect faster collaboration and output
What launched

A personalized PayPal ads experience on the Attomax homepage, designed to feel like a natural extension of both rather than an interruption to either.

The pilot experience launched on the Attomax homepage, surfacing PayPal-powered personalized recommendations in a way that complemented the merchant's existing experience rather than competing with it. The design maintained clear PayPal brand presence, a trust signal for customers familiar with PayPal, while being visually integrated enough to feel native to the Attomax context.

The core design principle throughout was restraint. In a first release moving at speed, the temptation is to demonstrate capability by showing everything the system can do. The better instinct, and the one we followed, was to show only what earned its place in the experience, leaving room to iterate once we had real customer signal to work from.

PayPal Personalized Ads Attomax pilot
Lessons learned

Building the Attomax pilot reinforced the human mechanics of personalization as well as the importance of maintaining a holistic perspective of the customer.

Moving fast on a first pilot in a space as nuanced as personalized ads meant making design decisions under uncertainty. These are the two that stuck.

01
Personalization requires restraint. Knowing a lot doesn't mean saying a lot
The difference between a personalized experience that feels delightful and one that feels creepy has everything to do with how you bake in the mechanics of human relationships. Just because a system knows a great deal about someone doesn't mean it's socially appropriate to surface everything it knows as a lever to drive a purchase. Real human relationships are built gradually. You lead with the least amount needed to begin what is essentially a social interaction, and you earn the right to go deeper over time. Personalization at its best follows the same instinct. Restraint isn't a limitation of the system. It's a design decision that builds the trust required for the relationship to go anywhere at all.
02
The merchant is just as much the customer as the consumer
As owners of the merchant experience, pilot partners like Attomax had just as much at stake in how the ads experience felt as the consumers interacting with it. Watching that dynamic play out in real time, on calls where we walked through design directions together, was a genuine education. What they considered worthwhile, how protective they were of their brand environment, and the delicate balance of introducing a third party presence into a space they'd carefully built, all of that shaped the work in ways no internal brief could have anticipated. It reinforced something worth carrying forward into any platform work: the people whose environment you're designing into are partners, not just stakeholders. Their point of view isn't an obstacle to the vision. It's part of what makes the product real.
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