Rakuten Advertising Brand Materials
Rakuten Advertising has a global audience, a lot of different things to say, and a brand that needs to work just about everywhere. As an art director on the in-house creative team, part of my job is figuring out how to make that happen without everything looking exactly the same.
I develop and present visual directions for campaigns and brand extensions, working with marketing, strategy, content, and leadership to bring ideas from the early concept stage through execution. That work spans digital, social, email, presentations, motion, events, and plenty of iterations in between.
With teams across North America, Brazil, EMEA, and APAC, the challenge is finding ways for each campaign or experience to have its own personality while still feeling distinctly Rakuten Advertising.
MY ROLE | Art Direction · Campaign Concepting · Brand Development · Digital & Experiential Design
Showing up around the world
Rakuten Advertising hosts and attends events across the globe, including its flagship DealMaker series. Each event comes with its own venue, audience, and set of challenges, but they all need to feel like part of the same brand.
Working within the creative team, I've helped bring that identity into physical spaces through event graphics, environmental design, and branded experiences. It's a chance to take work that usually lives on a screen and figure out how it translates into the real world with real people interacting around it.
Making data something to look at
At Rakuten Advertising, I've art directed and designed insight-led ebooks and their corresponding campaigns that make dense research easier to follow through thoughtful layouts and engaging visuals. Both Asia Travel Pulse and The Full Picture needed their own visual identities while still feeling connected to the larger Rakuten Advertising brand.
For Asia Travel Pulse, I leaned into travel photography, playful layouts, and the existing purple and blue palette to give the research its own personality. For The Full Picture, I pulled from the campaign's language around lenses, clarity, and perspective to create custom glass-like shapes that play with light, color, and distortion.
The two campaigns look different from each other, but both feel at home within the Rakuten Advertising brand.
The brand spectrum
Beyond individual campaigns, a big part of my work is helping keep the brand consistent across all the places it shows up.
That includes developing creative for paid and organic social, newsletters, digital advertising, presentations, animated videos, and other marketing materials, as well as contributing to brand guidelines and creative processes that help teams work more consistently.
Some projects call for something bold and unexpected. Others need to be simple, useful, and easy for someone else to pick up and run with. I like to think of brand identities on a spectrum between the two ends.
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: ELLIOTT WHITESIDE
SENIOR ART DIRECTOR: JOHN QUIJANO
ART DIRECTOR: SARAH LANGSTON