Ads Transparency Center
Overview
In June 2018, Twitter launched the Ads Transparency Center (ATC) in an effort to provide more transparency and confidence to users following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In addition to ATC, which offers more promoted Tweet details particularly for political campaigns, Twitter started enforcing stricter policies for political advertisers.
My role: I was the product design lead partnering closely with the PM and client and backend engineers to launch this product on a tight deadline of 6 months. I collaborated with both design systems team to leverage the appropriate consumer and advertiser-facing components so the team could define, build and ship the necessary features.
Political ad badging and disclaimer
The new Political Campaigning Policy enforces advertisers to self-identify and certify they are located in the U.S in order to run political ads.
When a certified political advertiser promotes an ad, the ad will include a promoted badge labeled, "political" and disclaimer information about who paid for it and whether it was authorized by a candidate.
Search
ATC is globally accessible whether someone is logged into Twitter or not. Advertisers are searchable by username or handle and in a later phase, certified political advertisers will be listed in a single location for easier browsing and access.
Advertiser profile + Billing
For non-political advertisers, ads served in the last 7 days will be displayed in the profile's timeline and for political advertisers, all ads are visible indefinitely with some exceptions associated with deletion, suspension or violation of policy. Political advertiser profiles have an additional 'Billing information' tab that shows an aggregate list of funding sources.
Ad spend + targeting
For all political Tweets, we show the performance summary, which includes total ad spend and impressions, along with all campaigns the Tweet was used in. Additionally, within each campaign, we show the performance summary and demographic targeting data, both intended and actual for further transparency.
Results: Given the tight deadline, we launched the Ads Transparency Center in phases. The first phase was grounded on early customer and foundational needs (as seen above) and we sequenced the second phase based on customer needs to iterate and refine the experience. For the second phase, I partnered with my PM to create a product strategy and roadmap to hand the work over to my Summer Intern whom I managed in 2019.
Press releases: Twitter Blog, NYTimes, VentureBeat, Bloomberg, TechCrunch