Julie Vezzani

A positive, friendly attitude, more than anything else. I love working with people. Conversing, learning from them, getting to know them, working with them on a deeper level is my favorite part of the job, and it's also why I've grown into a women's golf community on the side. Working with women has been the light of my experience, both watching women in leadership and meeting women just coming into the field. I've been lucky to have great mentors and female role models along the way. The other piece is staying adaptable. Optimistic about what comes next, but flexible about how it gets there. Things rarely unfold exactly the way you expect, and being able to adjust without losing your footing has been a real part of how I've grown.

The best career advice I've ever received is that doing your best looks different each day. On a hard day, your best might be quiet and protective of your energy. On a great day, your best might be showing up huge for the people around you. Both count, and learning to recognize which kind of day you're in is one of the most useful skills I've built. Now that I lead a team, I try to model that same approach. The version of me that walks into a Monday meeting sets the temperature for the room, and being honest about that responsibility has been one of the most quietly important parts of growing into leadership.

Be patient with yourself. You might start somewhere and end up somewhere completely different, and that's okay. Not all of it has to break for you at once. Being adaptable matters. Things rarely unfold the way you expect, and learning to roll with that is one of the most useful skills you can build.

The other piece of advice I'd give is to find something outside of work that fills your cup. Volunteering, getting outside, building a community of your own. For me, that's been co-leading a women's golf community, which has given me a place to bring people together that has nothing to do with my day job. It also turns out to make me better at the day job, because you can't pour from an empty cup.

When you're starting out, it's tempting to do as much as possible. Long hours, early mornings, saying yes to everything. But that's also the fastest way to burn out before your career has even really started. The women I've watched grow into the strongest careers are the ones who learned early how to protect their energy, not just spend it.

The biggest shift I see in marketing right now is that brands aren't winning on scale anymore. They're winning on depth. For a long time the goal was reaching as many people as possible, and the brands with the biggest budgets had the biggest advantage. That's changing. The brands that are actually building cultural relevance are the ones investing in real community work. Smaller audiences, deeper relationships, more authentic content. The opportunity is that this kind of work isn't gated by budget the way traditional advertising was. Anyone with a real point of view and a willingness to show up consistently for a specific group of people can build something meaningful. That's why I think this is one of the most exciting moments to be in the field, especially for women, because we are naturally good at building community. Many of the strongest brand-builders I'm watching right now are women who started by building real community first, and turned that instinct into a career.

Two values shape almost every decision I make, at work and outside of it. The first is investing in people. Real relationships, not transactional ones. The most meaningful parts of my career have been the relationships I've built and the people I've watched grow into themselves, including three of my direct reports who have been promoted under my leadership. That kind of growth is worth more to me than any campaign metric. The second is alignment between how I work and how I live. I haven't always had that, and I think most early-career women don't. But over time I've gotten clearer about which kinds of work give me energy and which kinds take it. There's a third thing I'd add, more as a hard-won lesson than a value. Sustainable effort beats heroic effort. It took me a while to internalize that doing your best looks different each day, and that protecting your energy is part of how you stay in the work for the long run.