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Creative by design

Adapt.
Aspire.
Lead.

Accomplished professional and active designer with creative expertise in branding, marketing, advertising, and event management. Proficient in conceiving, collaborating, and developing multi-platform creative strategies and campaigns that drive performance and results. Ability to build and mentor high-performing global teams to drive impactful brand alignment, awareness, and sales growth. Adept at building, optimizing, and managing design and brand governance protocols to inspire adoption and consistency.

Creative Concept & Development

Marketing & Brand Strategy

Marketing & Ad Campaigns

Brand Guidelines & Governance

Collaboration & Leadership

Team Development & Culture

The journey is the reward.

– Steve Jobs

Ashley Furniture Industries // November 2022 – Current

Creative Accounts Director, Ashley Global Retail

Lead and direct the creative account team and external agency resources to ensure multi-channel campaigns meet brand standards, timelines, and budget. Collaborate and align with marketing and advertising teams on annual initiatives, planning, and development by contributing strategic and creative solutions. Develop an agile and scalable foundation of systems, standards, and processes to reduce friction, nurture creative design, and maximize production.

Ashley Furniture Industries // Dec 2021 – November 2022

Creative Director, Ashley Outlet

Established an integrated identity and design system to deliver a differentiated retail brand structure. Developed strategic initiatives to build out campaigns and assets for scale and accessibility to multiple levels of marketing partners while enabling brand adoption and consistency to form a unified consumer experience.

Constructed a project management system to provide processes and standardization to drive efficiency, communication, and workflow. while extending tracking and reporting capabilities.

Rakuten Advertising // Aug 2007 – Apr 2021

Sr. Creative Director, Global Marketing, Events, and Creative Operations

While developing creative for high-level company initiatives and providing overall design direction, built and led a high-performing global creative organization to support multiple functions and business units emphasizing breaking down legacy silos to work across channels, time zones, and continents.

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Brand Standards and Identity Creative Development:

  • Market and
    Competitive Research
  • Positioning &
    Development
  • Standardization &
    Guidelines
  • Asset
    Management
  • Oversaw the creative evolution of a complex global ecosystem merging multiple companies (and logos) through alignments and rebrands into a single identity.
  • Built standardization practices to facilitate brand alignment, growth, and evangelism. Establishing these standards allowed global teams to seamlessly adopt while improving efficiency and services in a fast-paced organization that required quick turnarounds.
  • Incorporated and managed governance protocols to drive implementation and adherence to global brand standards while providing additional oversight of directives, practices, and initiatives with parent company in Japan. Additionally, building corporate relationships through thoughtful and responsive communication accelerated campaign execution and performance.
  • Recognized as an Innovation Finalist spearheading and creating a comprehensive in-house digital asset management portal. This saved over $30,000 annually (avoiding the expense of using an external platform), scaled accessibility to assets, and drove brand adoption globally.
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Marketing and Advertising Creative:

  • Sales Enablement
  • Collateral
  • Presentations
  • eReports
  • Delivered world-class creative devices focused on articulating each stage of the sales funnel and providing presentation tools to dynamically tell the story of each product’s influence throughout the consumer journey. This increased prospect engagement, drove sales, and a holistic brand experience.
  • Developed creative for regional, global, and brand campaigns across all mediums to build brand consistency, awareness and drove year-over-year engagement.
  • Incorporated various business initiatives from marketing leads and stakeholders across individual regions to conceive and build lead-generating projects that grew sales opportunities and improved brand equity.
  • Designed regional creative to respect cultural subtleties and nuances while maintaining the brand standard for both print and demand-focused digital ad and marketing campaigns.
  • Partnered with regional marketing leaders to build targeted account-based marketing initiatives and campaigns.
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Global Event Creative:

  • Digital & Display
  • Signage & Print
  • Mobile & Messaging
  • Keynotes & Other Presentations
  • Developed annual creative strategies focused on a consistent brand experience yet highlighted unique regional iconography and nuances.
  • Created differentiated identities annually that built excitement, drove engagement, and increased attendance greater than 18% each year for the last five years (pre-pandemic).
  • Worked directly with C-level executives to develop opening remarks, keynotes, and strategic presentations at globally hosted and industry events.
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Global Creative Organization:

  • Organizational Development
  • Mentoring & Leadership
  • Inclusive & Growth Culture
  • High Focus on Retention
  • Created a single organizational culture of designers across various disciplines and global regions that increased functional capacity, improved efficiencies, and delivered greater performance.
  • Drove efficiencies through a unified project management operation model allowing teams to improve team workflows, communication, and deliverables.
  • Adapted team objectives to meet global creative needs (external and internal), aligned available resources and capabilities, and developed strategies that would meet corporate goals and objectives.
  • Developed comprehensive team hierarchies through multi-functional career paths while mentoring and fostering individual career growth to nurture an organic creative culture.
  • Established workflows and collaborated with regional marketing directors to build account-based marketing initiatives and campaigns.
  • Built brand integrated templates to extend the brand experience, empower sales and client services teams to incorporate account information that drove growth and retention.

Rakuten Marketing

Previous Roles

Oct 2015 – Apr 2018

Creative Director, Global Marketing and Events

May 2014 – Oct 2015

Director of Marketing,
Paid Search

May 2011 – May 2014

Sr. Creative Developer, Global Marketing and Events

Aug 2007 – May 2011

Sr. Creative Developer, Lead Generation

RoomSaver/Traveler Discount Guide // Gainesville, FL

Marketing Director

Developed a national marketing and creative rebranding strategy.

Zimmerman Advertising // Ft. Lauderdale, FL

Sr. Account Executive / Sr. Designer

In a dual role, managed single most lucrative client for the agency.

KCI Design // Florida

Creative Director

Freelance creative development helping underserved charitable organizations and businesses.

McAlear Advertising // West Palm Beach, FL

Sr. Art Director

Led creative team, developed storyboards and scripts for television and radio.

Denight Advertising // Hagåtña, Guam

Art Director

Heavy emphasis on newspaper advertising (clients include Miller, Philip Morris, Citibank, Hilton and Hyatt Regency Hotels, IT&E (AT&T Guam), CBS, NBC and WB TV Networks.

PBT Design // Palm Beach, FL

Graphic Designer / Illustrator

Brand development and creative design. Client brand focus: Marriott, Hilton, Florida Tan, Wiamea Gold, AmCorp

03 // Relationships

Heavy emphasis on building trust fostered through inclusion, collaboration, and transparency.

Ken is a problem solver, a collaborative thinker and a great creative partner. He is a master at taking words and stories and illustrating them through design, and has worked closely with executive leadership to bring their speeches to life through imagery and animation.
Nicole Pace

VP of Marketing, North America

Ken has reformed the way I look at and understand brand standards, enhanced the look and feel of my own internal and external presentations ten-fold and helped me to evangelize the benefits of working cross-functionally and with a global perspective. One of Ken’s greatest strengths, outside of his exceptional band and creative development, is his ability in nurturing a truly creative culture, injected with humor, with his team and with others outside of his organization.
Aimee Cerny, MBA

Senior Director, Client Services

Ken Drab is a leader, a forward thinker and a great designer. As a manager, his support and backing of those under him was exceptional finding ways to support and push you to do better and be better. Working with Ken has been a great experience.
Raul Sinclair

Senior Designer, Creative Marketing

Early in my career, Ken was one of the first people I collaborated with and he was incredibly patient and helpful in sharing information and best practices with me as I was learning processes and systems. As I have grown in my role Ken has continued to be supportive, responsive and has added value to everything we have worked on together.
Meytal Markman

Technical Product Manager, Strategist & Writer

04 // Let’s Create

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