Kara Benton | Creative leader, writer, strategist

Coming soon.

Coming soon.

Brand development, product development, brand strategy, content strategy, blog content and management, email, and marketing (OOH, YouTube, radio, social, and site).

Brand development, content strategy, guidelines, content development, rollout. 

Nike wanted to boost membership and evolve into a more service-oriented brand. Nike+, their membership tier, was dramatically under-loved by Nike and members alike. But there was so much potential.   

I was hired to help Nike create an app that would serve members better, more personally, beyond just product.

The strategy was to create an experience that brought the Nike promise to every member through engaging, insider content—with rich exclusives, celebrating every athlete and every athletic moment. We created a content strategy around the best of Nike, aligning 14 different Nike categories under one app.

In a lot of ways it was a unifying exercise—each Nike category had been doing their own thing for so long, speaking their own way, designing to their own specs. But together, they weren’t successfully laddering up to the larger Nike brand. Our strategy gave them that. It defined the overarching Nike+ brand and how it should speak to its members. Then we worked with each category to help them define their unique offering within the larger strategy and how to speak using the Nike voice, but in their own special tone of it.  

From concept to design, content strategy to creative direction, content planning and timelines, who to interview, what to ask, image specs, and word choice—my team was the authority. 

We spent months running workshops on the large and small scale, working with each group to create best-in-class content that met the quality standards we had set—making sure every detail felt interestingly Nike enough but also uniquely tennis, for example.

In the app, all this content we were creating gets served to users via a feed. Members subscribe to the kinds of content they want, including things like category-specific pro tips, athlete workouts, interviews, playlists, new releases, limited promotions. And, of course, a personalized shopping experience—working harder to get the right product to the right consumer. 

Behind-the-scenes, Nike is working to get to know members better than ever before, and targeting exclusive promotions at them, like event invites and pre-released products.

The whole experience was designed to grow with Nike and members toward the future. To get smarter and better over time. Everything they need to create an unprecedented, automated personalized member experience is built in. It’s just a matter of time.

Brand transformation, guidelines, website re-design, global rollout. 

Volvo was undergoing a brand makeover. “A new era of design.” Looking to change the way we see the future of smart, luxury cars, with new, more thoughtful designs that just feel dramatically different—cozier, more intuitive, more wonderfully Swedish. 

But their digital presence was a far cry from the stylish, futuristic tone they wanted to put forward. So, my team set out to connect this redefined Volvo to a worldwide audience, building a brand new digital platform—with just a few months to get it up before auto show season.   

From a language perspective, humanization was the name of the game. Volvo was known for safety, but not much else. They needed to build emotional appeal. So we worked with stakeholders to articulate what makes the brand stand out, who they should be speaking to, and how. To create a new voice and content strategy set out to speak genuinely to consumers around the globe, while staying true to the brand’s unique Swedish nature.

We cut out the jargon and stripped every feature of every car down to the real human benefits a user would experience behind the wheel. Focusing on how each car, and Volvo as a whole, is different from the competition. 

My role was leading this effort, defining the voice and the approach, implementing them, and documenting how to put them to use and what it means to write for Volvo moving forward.

From start to finish, every effort was a global collaboration. To tell the story we wanted to tell, each detail—copy, visuals, interactions, animations, everything—had to be in sync, working harder together to say more.

Between my team in New York and the experience and design teams in Sweden, we worked around the clock to make sure every element and every word had a purpose in shaping the overall goal for each page and the site as a whole—all to convey the feeling of driving in this new kind of intelligent luxury. 

Brand development, guidelines, asset creation. 

ASICS was bleeding loyalists and this program was intended as damage control to bring serious runners back to the brand. 

My team at Inamoto & Co worked closely with team ASICS to design every element of the program, including who we should speak to (runners vs everyone), what we should offer, and what the experience should be like.

I owned all the writing from top to bottom, articulating what the brand stands for, how it acts, how it sounds, and what it says.

So it goes, we didn’t get all the member benefits we proposed, but we have big hope for the future—that ASICS will use this platform to step up and prove how serious they are about runners and serve their audience in more meaningful ways. 

Coming soon.

Thought leadership piece for an agency I was working with, promoted with Axios.

Smartwatch app creation. 

The watch-making mega-brand finally decided to throw their hat into the smartwatch ring and wanted to do it in a uniquely Fossil way. The brand had been bringing the fun to the watch world since the ‘80s and had to uphold that legacy.

It would, of course, track steps and sleep like all the rest, but it had to serve that data more elegantly and more, well, fun-ly than anyone else. The watch itself would stay true to Fossil’s stylish roots, filling a gap in the wearable market.

We quickly formed a super tight-knit all-star team to start development—on the device itself and the corresponding app. We worked extremely collaboratively to marry the watch aesthetic and notification cues to lovely fonts, adorable graphics, a seamless interface, and a quirky, jovial tone. Everything about it is a pleasure to use. Every detail down to error states was thoughtfully considered and generously loved. It’s light, silly and fun, just as Fossil has been since day 1. I worked as a creative lead and sole writer.

Fossil was so happy with what we created that they wanted more—a deeper way to engage. So we created a type of curiosity-challenge level on top of the baseline functionality, encouraging users to tickle their own curiously through simple creative challenges each week.

The whole experience was extremely fun and a huge creative challenge.

After just a few months on the shelves, Fossil Q devices became one of their best-selling products of all time.

Brand guidelines with a subtle facelift. 

This going-on-three-hundred year old auction house is an institution in the art world. They pride themselves on being world-class in every way—a picture of sophistication, culture, knowledge—an authority on all things beautiful. 

Elite, but welcoming is their approach—“everyone should come and enjoy our high society, but not everyone really fits in” kind of thing. 

They have an enormous presence and character, but in this crazy world of all things digital, their brand got away from them a bit. Inconsistency is oh so unbecoming and when your audience is dropping millions, you can’t be caught dropping the ball. 

They were speaking volumes about volumes of beautiful things across categories and mediums, but didn’t have a solid voice with which to speak. 

That’s where me and the gang at Inamoto & Co come in. 

As I do, we worked closely with the brand’s owners to define and articulate who the brand is, what it stands for, and how it speaks to “collectors”—differently in different places. 

It was such a fun, interesting, tricky exercise—because everyone was so emphatic that they KNEW who the brand was, but in all our interviews, when asked, no one could put words to it. 

A brand’s personality is not so unlike that of a person and this one was more complex than most, with a lot of contradiction and nuance. 

The document we put together included guidelines and examples to get everyone marching to the same drum, putting new words to the feelings the old brand gave off, with a subtle shift toward the future—modernizing the tone and content strategy to speak meaningfully to broader audiences. Setting guardrails to help the brand feel fresh, without losing that je ne sais quoi that makes Sotheby’s so Sotheby’s. 

Praises were sung for our work by all involved, including Sotheby’s CEO. 

Digital brand transformation, content strategy, website re-imagine and re-design. 

HBO probably has the best entertainment content on the planet. But when they came to R/GA, their digital presences needed help, desperately. Among many, many other issues, they had zero supporting content for their programming and had no idea how to approach the idea of even offering such a thing.

My team at R/GA set out to help HBO navigate in this new-ish digital world of content, video and giving users more, more, more.

We started by dissecting every element of the brand, picking it apart piece by piece, treating each category as a sub-brand and strategizing what HBO can do to stand out in each one—how they can own the documentary category and be the go-to destination for all things original programming. Creating content strategies inside content strategies before content strategies were even a thing.

What we launched was a full-screen experience that immerses users in what’s new, what’s popular and what they want to see—creating a visual story arc for each unique HBO property, picking up where the show, movie, event or documentary left off.

I was the main writer on the project and pseudo content strategist from pitch to launch, and worked extremely closely with HBO’s internal team to redefine their online voice, how they speak about each individual property and the kinds of things they should say and create. From there, I worked with individual stakeholders to introduce the new approach to their teams.

Somewhere along the way, it became excruciating clear that HBO could not launch a site with videos, without offering full-length content. So, we (finally) got the green light to also develop their subscription model, which became HBO GO.

Check out the case study video above for more. 

Brand development, strategy, and asset creation. 

Back in the ‘80s when aerobics was getting big, Nike created a discount program for personal trainers and instructors. It was apparently a huge success, but because of internal system changes, the program was eliminated. It was my team’s job to bring the program back and up to date.   

Of course the Nike of today would never have a mere “discount” program. It had to be an exclusive club with insider access to the best of Nike.

The experience had to be seamless and make the trainer community feel special. How the invitations were delivered was key. We decided that printed, in-person delivery was the best method to conjure that elite-invitation feeling. And there was a trainer conference that Nike was vaguely involved in that would be the perfect beta audience, but the date was fast approaching.

Creating the seamless experience we all imagined started getting harder by the second. With every meeting we had—with the Nike email team, the membership team, the .com team, the discount code team, (so many teams!)—the more challenging this simple project became.

We ended up creating a four-phase approach to rollout the program a little at a time, given the time and internal constraints.

It was an extreme collaboration between our creative and strategy and technology teams and a number of groups within Nike to manage all the moving, ever-changing parts and ensure the quality of the experience, both from a technical and creative standpoint.

Looking back, the list of challenges we faced seemed endless. But we launched on time with an air-tight system. On the backend, it’s very complicated, but for the user, it ended up being simple and successful.

Brand voice transformation, guidelines, website re-design.

The Brooklyn Academy of music is different things to different people. So their website has to wear a lot of hats.

As a performance venue, the site has to be more useful, easier to navigate to get show information, times, and tickets. As a cultural hub, they need a place to build relationships, foster education, and start conversations. And as a not-for-profit, they have to work harder than most to sell the brand, prove their value, rally support (and attract rich people)—because everything relies on contributions. 

Our vision for the new BAM.org suggested a radical overhaul of how the organization presented itself online, and how one website can cater to many needs, tell many stories, and still maintain one focused point of view—through a unified strategy, brand voice, and visual language.

The modular system we designed gave BAM a new kind of flexibility to do more and say more, in a new, more engaging, more flirtatious format—every element working together to showcase the brand’s quirky personality.

With this flexibility came the opportunity to create more content for the site. So we worked closely with the org to identify the right places to add value and how—how they can celebrate their stars and patrons and Brooklyn pride in a way that is uniquely engaging and uniquely BAM. Singing the praises of the beautiful weirdos, without turning off any of the more sophisticated types (since BAM really is home to both).

Today, the future-ready website we set out to create proves to be just that (we continue to see copycats), and the brand continues to maintain our vision for their one-of-a-kind digital destination. 

 I loved everything about this project. We had a small, amazing team who worked extremely close together to realize the vision and we really, genuinely collaborated with clients every week.

Digital brand transformation, content strategy, website re-design.

All anyone wants inside the Samsung Global headquarters is to crush the competition. Samsung has to be the best. Yes, Samsung has a good reputation. But it was no secret that the brand lacked personality and identity. And internally, internationally, between categories, there was little to no cohesion—sending mixed messages to consumers, on top of the massive inefficiencies. (Also, they were by no means crushing said competition.)

My team set out to unify the Samsung brand, making each category a part of the bigger picture. We started with a new digital global platform and two small goals: to strengthen this mega brand in the eyes of consumers and to be the best in class. And every step of the way, Samsung rigorously tested us on the criteria.

Of course, for a brand like Samsung, to set a new tone, they needed a content strategy. Before, they’d launch a video here and a video there, and a lot of those videos got good traction, but they weren’t part of a bigger picture. They were cool. But they weren’t really serving the brand the way they could. So, with a much smaller team, we developed a strong point of view on who Samsung can be and what they need to deliver to be more important as a brand in the eyes of their target audience, which is everybody.

But at the end of the day, the new site, the new style, the new voice and strategy, meant nothing if they weren’t easy to execute across markets. So we delivered what we called a “playbook” to give Samsung content creators around the world all the tools and knowledge they needed to adhere to the new standards, step by step. And we worked with Samsung global to help them train and incentivize their local markets to adhere to the new global standards. All of which, I played a major role in.

Across multiple streams of work for Samsung global, I was the go-to brand advocate, leading the writing charge, ensuring consistency and making sure all efforts were in sync, laddering up to our main goals and strategies. I worked with an all-star design team—some of the very best at R/GA—managed several writers and lead a weekly presentation of work with our clients in Korea. 

Concept creation, strategy, and storytelling for flagship retail location. 

H&M was opening their new flagship store in Times Square and they wanted it to be smart, digital and future-forward. Working with the (all-male) retail team at R/GA, including technologists and architects, I helped to concept ideas for digital touch points in and connecting to the store, including the runway execution they’ve become most famous for.

I was responsible for writing the pitch decks and working with the team to define the user experience, making sure each step is intuitive and fun—including the social outputs and exterior signage.

Watch the video to get a better feel for the project and process as a whole.

(The thumbnail you saw on the previous page was me acting as a model at our shoot.)

Content creation, trend tracking, editorial management. 

FutureVision is a print and digital publication put out by R/GA to keep a close eye on what’s happening in the tech and marketing industries—to keep our employees and our clients in the know. As a member of this team, I worked to keep a finger on the pulse of what's new and cool, articulate what’s trending or about to trend and boil down what’s happening right now into easy-to-digest blog posts and longer-form articles for our daily newsletters and our bi-annual print issue.

I also helped recruit new writers and set higher standards for our day-to-day operations and outputs. 

CRM, communication strategy, content creation, editorial management. 

I love CRM. It sets a flexible framework for brands to communicate beyond marketing, to have fun and really define their value and personality to different targeted audiences. And that’s why I loved this project.

We helped Microsoft define a communication strategy for four different audiences, which meant my team was managing four different streams of work happening at the same time. On the day-to-day, that meant having to juggle, being hypersensitive to every detail and having to balance lots of lots of meetings with getting lots and lots done.

This was especially true as we neared the launch of Windows 8, when, aside from a slew of added digital executions, a new app, social pushes, etc., we were working hand-in-hand with our events department to coordinate a complete Time Square takeover to show off the new features. 

From start to finish, I was a major player in developing and maintaining the program. On the day-to-day, that meant concepting themes and content for each issue, managing a team of junior writers and designers, running multiple client reviews each week and working closely with our analytics team to test versions and incorporate findings.

Brand development, content strategy, website creation.

Coca-Cola wanted to experiment with a social networking model that would replace their existing, more traditional rewards program (save bottle caps, get schwag). 

My team came in to design how this program could work and create a beta destination for the Coke Zero audience—a younger, male demographic.

In the new experience, branded "missions" challenge users to work together to unlock rewards, while smaller-scale challenges (“moments”) allow individuals to complete tasks that build their status—three different levels, which are linked to different types of rewards. 

As the lead and sole writer on the project, I conjured my inner frat guy and provided Coke with a multitude of versions for the missions and moments, as well as tone of voice guidance, and copy for the full experience, including emails. I also worked closely with the internal team to iron out the experience flow within the constraints of an extremely tight timeline.

Brand transformation and website re-design. 

Hunter Douglas has some really innovative window shades. Yes, that’s really a thing. They can insulate your home to keep you cozier, help you save on energy costs and manipulate the sunlight to perfectly illuminate any room. You can control them from your phone and create timed settings to automatically optimize their benefits. But before my team stepped in, you would not know any of this from visiting their website or reading any of their marketing materials.

They’d been around for a while and it showed. Then, the smart homes market started heating up and Hunter Douglas saw their opening. They hired my team to spruce up their image and do a much-needed brand overhaul. To be seen as the smart, luxury product they really were.

As the lead and sole writer on the project, I had to understand every in and out of every product. There were product lines inside product lines inside product lines and I had to know how each one was different. I memorized every sales book, met with stakeholders, combed the internet for every piece of information I could find.

Once I was as close as I could become to an official expert, I broke down the benefits of every product and worked closely with the design team to showcase these benefits in a more visual way—to show, instead of tell, and keep the copy as short as possible to optimize for mobile, as well as short attention spans.