Role:
Creative Strategist & Designer
Scope:
Paid Creative Strategy, Design Systems, Channel-Specific Campaigns, A/B Testing, Creative Performance Analysis
PandaDoc is a B2B SaaS platform that helps businesses create, manage, and automate documents, making sales processes simpler and more efficient.
As a Marketing Design Team Lead, I focused on building a more strategic, collaborative, and data-driven approach to performance creative, connecting brand consistency, creative experimentation, and business goals.
My work went beyond designing ads. I developed a Paid Creative Playbook and Creative Learning Wall to establish shared processes between the design team, paid media team, and marketing stakeholders. These resources created a central place to access creative guidelines, track experiments, review performance insights, and build on previous learnings.
The goal was to move from isolated creative decisions to a continuous learning process. By understanding which messages, visuals, and concepts resonate with different audiences, we could make more informed design decisions, reduce repetitive work, and develop stronger creative hypotheses.
This approach helped bring greater clarity to cross-functional collaboration, improve creative efficiency, and build a scalable system where every campaign contributes to a deeper understanding of our audience and better creative decisions over time.
PandaDoc | Paid Creative Playbook & Learning Wall
The Challenge
A strong brand doesn’t automatically translate into strong advertising.
Paid advertising is one of the most important touchpoints between a brand and its potential customers. It's where creative decisions need to do more than look good — they need to capture attention, communicate value, build recognition, and drive measurable results.
At PandaDoc, multiple campaigns, audiences, channels, and designers created a growing demand for creative production. The challenge was to maintain a recognizable brand while making the creative process more efficient, collaborative, and informed by performance data.
Key Challenges
Brand Consistency vs. Creative Experimentation.
Maintain a recognizable visual identity across paid channels while allowing enough flexibility to test new concepts, messaging, and creative approaches.Creative Quality vs. Production Scale.
Deliver a growing volume of high-quality assets across different formats and campaigns without increasing production time, repetitive work, or unnecessary review cycles.Cross-Functional Alignment.
Improve collaboration between designers, the Paid Media team, and marketing stakeholders by establishing shared guidelines, clear processes, and a central source of information.Fragmented Performance Insights.
Bring creative assets, test results, and campaign learnings into one accessible system, making it easier to track performance, compare approaches, and understand what actually works.Audience Understanding & Data-Driven Decisions.
Move beyond assumptions by using creative testing to understand which messages, visuals, and value propositions resonate with different audience segments.Continuous Learning & Creative Improvement.
Turn individual campaign results into reusable knowledge, helping the team develop stronger hypotheses, avoid repeating unsuccessful approaches, and make better creative decisions over time.
The Opportunity
The opportunity was to build a connected creative ecosystem where brand guidelines, production workflows, performance insights, and experimentation work together.
Building the Paid Creative Playbook
Clear rules make better creative decisions easier.
I developed a practical set of guidelines specifically for paid advertising, translating our broader brand identity into principles designers could apply every day.
The playbook defined how to use typography, color, imagery, product visuals, messaging hierarchy, and brand elements across different formats.
It was built around five principles:
Clarity: Lead with one message people can understand quickly.
Impact: Capture attention with a clear visual idea.
Relevance: Design for the audience and the platform.
Consistency: Keep the brand recognizable while varying the execution.
Performance: Use results to inform future decisions.
This reduced guesswork, simplified reviews, and created a more reliable starting point for new campaigns.
Consistency Without Sameness
A scalable system should support both efficiency and creativity.
Not every ad needs a completely new concept. For straightforward messages and recurring campaigns, established layouts and visual patterns help us move quickly while maintaining consistency.
But performance creative also needs space to evolve. I treated the playbook as a flexible foundation rather than a fixed collection of templates.
For example, Reddit called for a different approach from traditional B2B advertising. I explored memes, humor, and relatable workplace frustrations, adapting them to PandaDoc's visual language.
The result was a system that supported both fast, repeatable production and more expressive ideas without losing the brand's identity.
Clear brand guidelines don't limit creativity — they create a foundation for experimentation. When the core visual principles are well defined, there's room to explore new styles, challenge conventions, and adapt to different audiences and platforms without losing brand recognition. For PandaDoc's Reddit campaigns, I explored a more experimental, platform-native visual approach, reflecting how Reddit audiences engage with content differently from LinkedIn or Meta. By combining these new creative directions with established brand elements, I was able to push the visual language further while keeping the work distinctly recognizable as PandaDoc.
Designing for Each Platform
The same brand needs different creative approaches in different environments.
People don't engage with an ad on LinkedIn the same way they do on Reddit or Meta. Each platform has its own audience expectations, content behavior, and visual conventions.
I introduced channel-specific recommendations to help guide creative decisions:
LinkedIn: Clear business value, professional relevance, and credible messaging.
Meta: Bold visual metaphors, simple messages, and expressive concepts that stand out in the feed.
Reddit: Native-feeling content, humor, and relatable pain points.
Programmatic: Immediate clarity, strong hierarchy, and recognizable branding in limited space.
YouTube: Strong opening moments, clear storytelling, and branding that works in motion.
These recommendations helped us create ads that felt appropriate to each environment while remaining part of the same brand.
Competitor Insights & Creative Benchmarks
Good creative decisions also require looking beyond our own brand.
Every quarter, I reviewed competitor advertising and broader creative trends to understand how brands were communicating, what visual approaches were emerging, and where opportunities existed to stand out.
I maintained a competitor creative feed, collecting examples and analyzing messaging, visual styles, formats, and recurring patterns.
The goal wasn't to follow trends blindly. It was to understand the competitive environment, challenge our assumptions, and find relevant inspiration for new experiments.
These reviews helped keep our creative thinking fresh while ensuring PandaDoc maintained a distinctive visual identity.
Testing Creative Hypotheses
One of the initiatives I’m most proud of is introducing the Creative Learning Wall.
We brought creative tests, campaign results, performance data, and key insights into one shared space, making them accessible to designers, marketers, and other stakeholders.
Successful creatives helped us understand what could be scaled. Underperforming ones were equally valuable, revealing gaps in our assumptions and inspiring new hypotheses.
By documenting and sharing these learnings continuously, we made experimentation more transparent, collaborative, and useful for future work.
The Outcome
A more consistent brand. A faster workflow. A smarter creative process.
The result was more than a collection of advertising guidelines.
It was a practical creative framework that connected brand identity, efficient production, platform relevance, and performance learning.
It helped us make everyday design decisions faster, explore new ideas with more confidence, and turn individual experiments into knowledge the wider team could reuse.
Most importantly, it created a way for the brand and its advertising to keep evolving together.
