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Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards Grand Jury
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Intertrend
BIO
Julia Y.C. Huang is the Founder and CEO of Intertrend, an award-winning creative agency and a leading voice in multicultural marketing and culturally driven brand strategy. With deep industry experience, she has shaped how major brands authentically engage diverse audiences — translating cultural insight into measurable business impact.
A recognized trailblazer in the industry, Huang has been named one of the 500 Most Influential Asian Americans and one of Fortune's Top Ten Entrepreneurs. She is a recipient of the Hall of Legend Award from the Asian American Advertising Federation — the field's highest honor for sustained leadership and cultural impact.
Beyond her agency work, Huang serves on the board of KCRW and the Long Beach Public Library Foundation, and chairs the Arts and Cultural Committee for the LA28 Olympic Games — reflecting her enduring commitment to culture as a force for connection and community.
Q&A with Julia Huang
What makes great marketing today?
The world is so cluttered with information that marketing today is mostly about speed and being loud. And yes, louder does get attention. But the marketing I'd actually call great isn't louder, it’s more observant. It notices something about people that they haven't quite put into words themselves, and reflects it back without the FOMO-fueled, knee-jerk urgency that seems to be winning the moment. I'm still betting on the quieter, more observant work. That's what builds a brand.
What is the one cultural trend you are watching today?
I am intrigued by how fast culture now moves. A teenager in Ohio is now capable of discovering a Korean indie band the same day a teenager in Seoul does. Thanks to the internet, consumers are discovering ideas, sounds, foods, and aesthetics from other cultures almost in real time. Yet the pitfall from this need for speed is the danger for a brand to getting it embarrassingly wrong when it comes to culture. What I'm watching is whether brands will treat speed as a pressure to move faster, or as a reason to be more intentional.
In one sentence, what will it take to make an entry worthy of winning a Grand Prize award?
The work should be culturally observant, creatively impactful, and makes sense commercially.
What advice would you offer to teams preparing submissions?
You should understand that the judges have read thousands of submissions, so they can sense a cookie-cutter entry almost immediately. (Thank you Chappy AKA ChatGPT) What I’d like to see is the moment of “Aha!" The moment it changed how the team thought about the brief, and what happened when you built the work around it. A great case study is always the honest one.
Why do awards programs like this matter to the health and progress of the marketing industry?
Because recognition is how we teach ourselves what to value. What we celebrate, we replicate. For too long, multicultural and inclusive work sat in its own quiet corner. Awards like the ANA Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards do something simple but powerful: they put culturally credible, commercially effective work on the main stage and make it the standard. And that's how we raise the bar for everyone.
When you review the “breakthrough insight” or “aha moment” behind a campaign, what tells you that a team has uncovered something truly meaningful? What do you most want to understand about their thinking in this section?
While we might be looking for that point of differentiation, in honesty, a meaningful insight probably has a small amount of familiarity to it. What I want to understand in this section isn't the insight itself. It's the work behind the work. How did the team get there? Who did they listen to, and who disagreed with the assumptions? Whose voice actually sharpened the idea? The teams that take this seriously can usually walk you through every wrong turn they made before they got there.
Risk taking and effectiveness, sometimes friends, sometimes foes. How have you handled the balance in your marketing experience?
I think “Risk-taking" might be one of the most misused words in our business. Most of what people call risk in marketing isn't actually risk, it’s unfamiliarity. The actual risk in marketing is being irrelevant. Nobody hates the work that plays it safe. But nobody remembers it either. And forgettable work is the most expensive kind of work there is. Effectiveness doesn't come from avoiding risk. The bold ideas that work are the ones that noticed something true about people, and built something from there. On the other hand, bold ones that fail are the ones that took the leap and arrogantly hoped the audience would follow.
How do you evaluate the role of data, AI, and marketing technology in creating meaningful brand impact?
The answer to this one probably leads to more questions. What I know is that AI tools and marketing technology are powerful, and they're not going away. Dismissing them or even suppressing their usage would be foolish. Yet I wonder whether using AI to understand an audience through keyboard tapping can produce the same kind of insight as actually sitting and talking with that audience. And I truly wonder whether the efficiency we gain through technology is quietly eroding the slower, harder work of cultural observation that brand-building has always depended on. For now, the principle I keep coming back to is this: data tells you What, AI can tell you What’s Next, and observation tells you the most important Why.
Get to know the 2026 Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards Grand Jurors.