Audience Based Advertising

Advertiser controls up front, with a global opt-out one level deeper and an explanation of what to expect.

The global advertising choice and its confirmation.

My role: Product Design, Design Strategy
Team: Jason Cross, Legal, the Targeting team, GTM and PM
When: 2024 · 8 Months
Platforms: iOS, Android, Web

visits to the privacy control: +14%
engagement with Learn more: +9%
estimated revenue change: +0.01%

The 30-second version

Problem: A typical person had thousands of advertisers in the list and could act on only one at a time.
What I did: Put advertiser controls first, added a global opt-out with an explanation, and exposed the data providers behind the lists.
Result: Visits to the control rose 14%. Revenue came out flat, an estimated +0.01%.

Context and constraints

Advertisers can upload a list, the people on their email list for example, and Meta matches it to profiles so those people see their ads. This control is where you find out which advertisers have included you that way and decide whether they can keep doing it. The EU was pushing hard on it, and the ads business needed it not to break performance.

My role and the team

I led the redesign of the advertiser controls, the global opt-out and the data-provider view. I worked with Legal, the Targeting team, GTM and PM.

The problem

A typical person had thousands of advertisers in this list, and you could only act on them one at a time. There was no way to opt out of all of them at once. The order didn't help you find the ones you cared about either, and it wasn't clear what turning one off would change about the ads you saw.

Key decisions

01 / 02

Where the global choice belongs

Options: A one-step global choice was proposed; the approved structure puts individual advertisers first.
The call: Put advertiser-by-advertiser controls first. Put the global opt-out one level deeper, with an explanation of what to expect.
Why: Advertising partners worried about a one-step global opt-out. Internal pushback and conversations with selected advertisers led to this structure.
Tradeoff: The global choice takes another level to reach.

02 / 02

Show the data provider

The call: Let people open a provider and see the advertisers using its list.
Why: A provider such as LiveRamp supplies lists to other advertisers. Seeing that relationship lets people act there instead of hunting through every brand it touches.

The work

The global choice. One answer covers every advertiser at once, and the confirmation says exactly what you chose and which profiles it applies to.

Ad preferences, then the list of advertisers you've seen ads from. Each one now says whether it used a list to reach you, and a filter cuts the list down to just those.

Data providers like LiveRamp build lists that other advertisers use to reach you. Open one and every advertiser using its list has its own switch. A single advertiser like Factor_ shows the list it used, with a button to stop it.

How it scaled

The global choice covers every list-based advertiser at once. The provider view groups the advertisers using a given provider’s list.

Results

Visits to the privacy control rose 14% and people engaged with Learn more 9% more. Revenue came out flat, an estimated +0.01%, even though anyone could now opt out of every list-based advertiser in one step.

visits to the privacy control: +14%
engagement with Learn more: +9%
estimated revenue change: +0.01%