Amazon Ads Rising Stars
Built in China, Ready for the World
Integrated Marketing Campaign
Challenge
Strategy
Visual System
Application
Outcome
Reflection
Client
Amazon Ads
Agency
IPG Mediabrands
Role
Visual Design Intern
Deliverables
Key Visuals, Episode Covers, Motion Elements, Event & OOH Adaptations
Year
2025
Location
Shanghai, China
Challenge
One campaign, fifteen ways to begin.
Rising Stars is an Amazon Ads campaign series spotlighting Chinese brands expanding globally through authentic stories of their vision and growth journeys.
Season 5 brought together brands across diverse industries and stages of growth, each with its own background, product focus and ambition. The challenge was to shape these distinct stories into a coherent, scalable series while preserving the individuality of each brand and allowing the campaign to extend across different content formats and touchpoints.
Strategy
Authentic stories of Chinese brands going global.
Rather than presenting success as a polished highlight reel, the campaign shifted the focus from business outcomes to the human journeys behind each brand.
What connected these stories was neither category nor product, but the people behind the businesses: why they started, how they grew, and the belief that kept them moving forward.
Rising Stars brought these individual stories together into a collective portrait of Chinese brands on the global stage.
Visual System
Amazon Ads Rising Stars Season 5 built on the global Rising Stars visual identity while calling for a distinctive approach to telling the stories of 15 Chinese brands.
I contributed to the design of the season’s campaign key visuals, seller key visuals, episode covers and selected motion elements. My focus was on translating the global visual language into designs tailored to the Chinese market and a range of content formats, giving the season one clear identity while letting each brand and its founders stand out.
The key visuals were developed around star motifs, typography and information hierarchy.
I enlarged the star and extended it beyond the frame, making it a defining feature of the composition. As the symbol at the heart of Rising Stars, the enlarged star kept the composition simple but bold, giving the campaign a recognisable mark that held its impact across social feeds, screens and out-of-home placements.
The campaign title, brand logos and key messages were organised within a more structured area, balancing boldness with readability.
Each seller key visual presented a different compositional challenge, with portraits ranging from individuals to pairs and larger groups.
I adjusted the scale and positioning of the portraits to suit different groupings, poses and formats, carefully balancing the subjects with background graphics and typography. Keeping the title and logos on a fixed white panel meant the portrait side could change from one founder to fifteen without the series losing its anchor.
The 15 brand stories covered a range of industries, filming settings and visual styles. To bring them together as a recognisable series, I developed a cover design system for Season 5, combining the series title, episode numbers, brand information and star motifs within a consistent layout. This allowed each brand’s imagery to retain its own character while establishing a clear visual identity across the series.
The system was later extended to Seasons 3 and 4, so the series reads as one across seasons.
Beyond static visuals, I contributed to the design of animated star-pattern backgrounds, scene transitions and a Chinese-language logo sequence.
As the global animation existed only in English, the Chinese sequence kept the stacked, repeating rhythm of the English typography to stay consistent with the global brand, while rebuilding it around the Chinese title for the local campaign, from episode openings and trailers to short social videos.
Application
Alongside the visual system, I also extended its application across social channels, premiere touchpoints and out-of-home media, carrying a consistent campaign identity from digital communication into physical and public spaces.
I designed social media assets for platforms including Bilibili, Weibo and TikTok (Douyin), covering channel visuals and promotional content for the series, adapting the layout to each platform’s header and feed formats so the campaign stayed recognisable wherever it appeared.
For the Season 5 premiere in Shenzhen, I extended the campaign key visual into invitations and venue graphics, and designed a range of on-site materials, including standees, handheld signs, microphone branding, seat numbers and wristbands.
For out-of-home advertising, I designed large-format campaign visuals for Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport, adapting the layouts to suit different placements and screen formats.
Shenzhen, home to many of China’s cross-border sellers, was also where the season premiered, so the campaign met its audience both online and on the ground.
Outcome
From Individual Stories to Wider Reach.
My visual design work, including key visuals, episode covers and motion graphics, was featured across social media, the Season 5 premiere and out-of-home advertising. These contributions supported the campaign’s rollout across online and offline channels, helping bring the stories of 15 Chinese brands to a wider audience.
Campaign results reflected both its reach across channels and a measurable lift in brand awareness.
*Metrics reflect overall campaign performance.
Reflection
“Know where to hold the line”
“Design the rules, not just the layouts”
“Design within a bigger team”
Rising Stars came with a clear global identity, so my role was less about inventing and more about judging what had to stay and what could make change. Keeping the star and the stacked typographic rhythm tied the series to the global brand, while the Chinese title sequence, layouts and formats were adjusted to feel at home in the local campaign.
With fifteen founders and dozens of formats, designing each visual one by one would have made the series hard to hold together. So I tried to set a few fixed rules first, such as the title panel and the cover structure, and let everything else flex. The series stayed visually consistent while still making room for very different content, and the work itself became faster and simpler.
Compared with a smaller design studio, where I had more room to make decisions on my own, working at a large agency meant my design was one part of a structured process shared across many teams. I learned that good work is not only about one strong visual, but about files others can build on, decisions I can explain clearly, and designs that stay coherent as they pass from one team to the next.
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