Grab Monetisation

Led Grab's consumer-facing monetization design team, focusing on Ads and Promos. Collaborated with core business units to boost ad inventory while enhancing user experience. Managed two junior to mid-level designers.

Why Ads?

Grab is an leading super app in 8 countries in SEA. Ads in Grab create a healthy ecosystem for all parties involved. Businesses including Grab merchants (eg. Mcdonalds) and Enterprise Avdertisers (eg. Dyson) gain visibility and reach, consumers get personalized recommendations, and Grab generates an additional revenue stream.

For this ecosystem to thrive, it's important to have a high pool of advertisers, leading to a competitive market and more targeted ads, which provide a personalized experience for users.

To drive demand, we must have enough ad inventory supply for our sales team to pitch.

My team

I led a design team of two designers, covering four teams: Food Ads, External Ads, Mart Ads, and Promos. I worked alongside leads from product, engineering, and analytics teams. My role was hybrid—part manager, part individual contributor—forming strategy with the leads and planning execution with the working teams.

Given our stretched team and tight deadlines, I helped my team manage and prioritize projects and tasks. Through discussions with functional leads and by understanding business priorities, I negotiated timelines and projects for the team while ensuring we delivered high-impact results.

Defining Ads Experience Principles.

When I started, I was skeptical of the goal given to me: double the ads on the platform. This skepticism encouraged me to understand the impact on user experience and build a deeper understanding of users' mindsets regarding the app's core flow. With my team's help, I organised user research and leveraged past studies within Grab to develop principles. These principles continued to inform our discussions even two years later.

Increasing Ad inventory by 2x

With tight timelines and high revenue targets, increasing slots of existing Ad formats: Listing Ads and Display Ads became the team's low-hanging fruit:

• Low development cost
• No learning curve for operational teams
• No new asset requirements for advertisers
• Users were already familiar with these formats

From a design perspective, this approach was straightforward in terms of UI. However, it presented challenges for UX and product strategy, involving Grab's three core businesses: food, transport, and consumer experience.

💰 This strategy itself increased the Ad inventory by 140% in one year.

Getting people together 🤝

I facilitated workshops and design jams to foster collaboration. My role involved aligning teams on goals, linking opportunities to OKRs, and securing buy-in for experiments.

A key responsibility was driving alignment through design activities, improving cross-team collaboration and aligning leadership on product direction.

Design jams included designers from various teams, many skeptical about ads. I involved them in ideation and educated them on advertising, while communicating industry regulations and constraints as the ads expert.

I worked closely with design and other functional leads from Consumer Experience, Transport and Food team.

Increasing Ad revenue: Premium Formats

After increasing inventory, our strategy had to pivot due to limited platform real estate and changes in core flows, which led to a loss in ad inventory and revenue. To mitigate this and continue growing the Ads business, I organised brainstorming sessions and alignment efforts to explore new opportunities for formats and placements.

This process was heavily design-led, as everything hinged on the engaging experiences we could offer our users and advertisers.

Unpacking 'Premium' Ad Formats

For this initiative, I spearheaded research with advertisers and facilitated discussions between our sales and business teams. Our goal was to pinpoint ad formats that would appeal to consumers, align with Grab's technical capabilities, and meet advertisers' needs.

Building a Win-Win Solution for Users, Brands, and Grab

Through close working groups with Head of Design, Head of GrabAds, Head of Engineers and Head of Product, shortlisting features that worked for all functions and stakeholders.

Portrait Ads

Grabs very own reel-like feature! Portrait content, especially videos, is becoming a common format to engage consumers. Advertiser are seeking these new immersive and premium formats as a effective way to reach their audience. On Grab’s home page, a Portrait Video & Image carousel is shown. This format is available for Food as well as External advertisers.

For this feature, I took it on as an Individual Contributor and led the execution.

Plays one asset at a time, auto-scrolls to next content, maximising the impressions collects on the Ads.

On click, expands to full page immersive view with more information about the Ad.

Vertical scroll to continue viewing more content, capturing impressions for each scroll.

Why short form videos?

Most brand advertisers likely already have creative assets in this format from other platforms they use to engage their customers. Using a standardized format reduces the barrier to adoption for advertisers.

Given how common this format is across popular platforms, the learning curve for consumers would be minimal as well. We've also heard directly from advertisers that this is a key format for them, and they're eagerly waiting for more platforms to adopt it.

A big win

Pilot launch, including renowned brands like Disney, H&M, Bumble, Netflix, Coca-Cola, McD, Pizza Hut and Nestlé, results validated that the format effectively captures consumer attention throughout the long vertical scroll which is a great advantage for the advertisers focused on creating awareness for their products via these videos.

✅ Engagement Boost: 3-4X ↑ in Video Completion Rates

The video completion rate for Portrait Ads is an astonishing 70%, 3-4 times higher than the existing video ads

✅ Conversion Success: 1.5X ↑ in Conversion

Orders per 1,000 ad impressions are 1.5 times greater than our existing ads

✅ Positive Business Impact: +7.8% Viewable Ad Inventory

An inventory and revenue increase and no negative effects observed on Food, Mart, Transport, or Express Bookings.

Iterations of components

As the feature evolved, I explored various ways to implement the experience. I iterated through different UI designs to bring the story-like feature to life, ultimately landing on a version that met our requirements.

As the UI neared finalization, other teams at Grab began exploring similar components and treatments for different parts of the app. This presented an opportunity to standardize the component and its interactions. I took on the role of main design point of contact, leading efforts to transform this into a design system component and collaborating with other designers to accommodate their use cases.