Role & Summary
Led design of BookMyShow's AdTech platform, splitting inventory between Bookers and Browsers to monetize non-transacting attention from ~50M monthly page views without disrupting booking.
Business Context
The obvious move was to add ad inventory wherever there was open screen space. But BookMyShow's two user types needed different treatment: a Booker (someone who transacts regularly) has zero tolerance for anything that slows down booking, while a Browser (someone who hasn't transacted in over a year) has attention that's genuinely available to monetize. Treating both the same would have meant either under-monetizing Browsers or degrading the experience for Bookers, the users the business depends on most. The real problem was building a system that could tell the difference and behave accordingly.
That gap between total traffic and completed transactions represented monetization the business wasn't capturing. The mandate was to build an AdTech platform that could turn non-transacting attention into revenue, without compromising the booking experience that drives the business's core transactions.
Strategic Decision
Protect the Booker, Monetize the Browser
Context: ad revenue and booking conversion could work against each other if ads were one undifferentiated inventory type.
Options: (1) one ad strategy uniformly across all users, or (2) split strategy by intent: protect the booking flow for Bookers while maximizing ad exposure for Browsers.
Trade-off: differentiation cost more to design and build (two clusters, guiding principles for each), but a uniform approach risked leaving revenue on the table or damaging the transaction flow.
Decision: split ad offerings into two clusters, Promoted (internal, sellable) and Ad (third-party, sponsored), governed by rules that prioritized never interrupting a Booker's flow.
Why: never get in the way of a Booker, never compete with internal messaging like offers and rewards, and maximize revenue from Browsers specifically. Revenue growth couldn't erode the experience that made the platform valuable.
Design Principles
1. Never Block a Booker: a user actively booking should never have an ad interrupt that flow.
2. Internal Messaging Comes First: offers and rewards from BookMyShow take priority over third-party ad inventory.
3. Monetize Attention, Not Screen Space: ad placement followed where non-transacting attention already existed, not empty space.
4. Always Have a Fallback: if the ad platform failed to serve, the space defaulted to internal content, never a blank placeholder.
Key Product Decisions
1. Custom transparent hero banner format: built around the movie's lead character with an "Interested?" CTA feeding directly into booking, converting ad engagement into ticket sales instead of a separate funnel.
2. Crossover ads reusing existing UI components: the same scrollable card pattern used for movies let multi-product brands like Starbucks and Amex showcase a range, widening the pool of sellable ad formats.
3. Published creative guidelines: a Creative Graphic Guidelines document covering specs, safe zones, and pass/fail examples let the platform scale to more advertisers without a proportional increase in manual review.
Outcomes
Business: created a new, dedicated revenue stream from ~50M monthly page views' worth of previously unmonetized, non-transacting attention.
Customer: Bookers kept an uninterrupted booking flow, while ads shown to Browsers were tied to content and brands relevant to what they were already looking at.
Operations: fallback logic meant ad-serving failures degraded to internal content instead of a blank or broken experience.
Engineering: creative guidelines reduced the need for manual, ad-hoc review as the number of advertisers grew.
Support: no support-specific data was available for this feature.
Reflection
The biggest surprise was how much the Booker/Browser split simplified every downstream decision. Once we had that distinction, questions like "should this ad show here" stopped being subjective and became a matter of checking which user we were looking at. I'd also build the creative guidelines earlier next time, alongside the first ad formats rather than after: we ended up writing standards for a system that had already shipped, retrofitting consistency instead of designing for it from the start.
The principle I still use: revenue features should be designed around protecting the behavior that makes the product valuable in the first place, not layered on top of it. Ads that compete with your core transaction are a tax on the business, not a new revenue line.
