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Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards Grand Jury
Partner and Head of Global Music Brand Strategy and Partnerships
United Talent Agency
BIO
Toni Wallace is one of the most influential brand strategists and cultural architects working at the intersection of music, entertainment, and global commerce today.
With over 25 years of experience building iconic brands, forging transformative partnerships, and shaping the future of culture, she has established herself as a defining force in the creative economy.
As the founder of UTA's Music Brand Partnerships division — now a nine-figure business with a team of 25+ representing more than 1,000 artists globally — Toni has pioneered a new model for how brands and talent create value together. Her work goes far beyond deal-making: she builds ecosystems, launches businesses, and engineers cultural moments that move markets.
Her portfolio speaks for itself. Toni architected the multi-year Bad Bunny x Adidas franchise — culminating in the BadBo 1.0, the first-ever signature sneaker by a Latin artist — and orchestrated its landmark integrations into the Grammy Awards and the most-watched Super Bowl Halftime performance in history. She drove the Karol G x Coca-Cola Coke Studio campaign which garnered over one billion YouTube views, making it the top branded music video of the decade, and served as a catalyst for Karol's song of the year Grammy win. She launched 200 Copas by Casa Dragones — Karol G's joint-venture tequila brand — which became the fastest-growing luxury tequila in the U.S.
Across two decades, she’s put together world-renowned collaborations and campaigns for brands such as Airbnb, Calvin Klein, Corona, Google, Gucci, L’Oréal, LVMH, McDonalds, New Balance, PepsiCo, Reebok, Unilever, and Visa just to name a few. She also personally represents a number of clients including Bad Bunny, Cardi B, Ca7riel & Paco, Eladio Carrión, Grace Wales Bonner, J. Cole, Karol G, Ludacris, Megan Moroney, Mel Robbins, and RIMAS Entertainment.
Before UTA, Toni held senior roles at Columbia Records and Microsoft, grounding her creative vision in rigorous business strategy.
She has been recognized by Billboard's Power 100, Billboard's Top Women in Music, Variety's LA Women's Impact Report, Pollstar's Women of Live, and Billboard's Inaugural Pride List, among others, and has served as a Clio Awards juror and winner. She holds a BA from Northeastern University and an MBA from McCombs School of Business.
Q&A with Toni Wallace
What makes great marketing today?
Great marketing today is about engineering organic cultural moments, and movements, that are grounded in strategy, insight, and your brand's DNA. Knowing your audience and what truly moves them - and building your marketing ecosystems around that - is how you earn, grow, and retain communities. Product marketing drives short-term transactions, whereas culture marketing drives brand equity and ownable audiences over a lifetime.
What is the one cultural trend you are watching today?
Equity and World-Building are two important trends I’m interested in. Leveraging cultural fluency and a long-tail narrative to move beyond the transactional and create real value for both brands and talent is how culture shifts. To achieve this, brands need to stop looking at talent as work for hire. Brands need to look at talent as partners and bring them in at the beginning of the process. Artists know how to build lasting equity with the consumers brands are trying to reach. Building ecosystems that are truly integrated at every level - and that utilize the voice, expertise, and DNA of both talent and brand - is where the true magic happens.
In one sentence, what will it take to make an entry worthy of winning a Grand Prize award?
Grand Prize winners should see the effects of their work ripple beyond the launch of their campaign and ultimately towards direct cultural impact and discourse. The campaign should talk back to them. And while it is hard to have original ideas all the time, originality that is unique to the brand and the goal of the campaign needs to shine through.
What advice would you offer to teams preparing submissions for the ANA Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards?
Tell a deeper story, reaching beyond the successes of the campaign and its metrics. How did this campaign touch consumers? What was its message? What was the tone and the scope of the conversation it generated? How did it engage with culture, and how did it move the needle for the brand? What were the sales and equity KPI’s achieved? Viewership is great, but if you truly impacted the business by acquiring more customers, more followers across your social platforms, and memorable moments that cut through, that's hard to beat.
Why do awards programs like ANA Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards matter to the health and progress of the marketing industry?
Aside from the important task of promoting equity and diversity in the work itself, award programs like this keep the larger marketing community honest. Our field of vision needs to be not only intuitive and insightful, but inclusive and reflective of an ever-evolving, ever-diverse, ever-savvy marketplace.
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?
As someone who builds brands and global businesses with talent, I’m very interested in understanding audiences, not only their demographics but their shared histories, values, and rituals. A “breakthrough insight,” to me, is a discovery that imparts meaning to these rituals. I want to understand the moment the team decoded in the audience’s vernacular and translated it into a meaningful call to action.
How have your expectations of great marketing evolved over the past few years, and how does that shape how you approach marketing?
I keep coming back to authenticity, strategy, and not following the latest fad. Great marketing will always be great marketing. And marketing is a critical function of success. Without an understanding of who the brand is and why it’s important to you, it’s very difficult for a brand to succeed over time with the exception of commodity businesses. For example, retail, OOH, and IRL moments. As recently as one to two years ago, the trades were saying retail is dead, gorilla marketing tactics don’t work, and all will be done in the metaverse. Meeting people where they are and tapping into something that is meaningful to them can never be replaced, and good marketing is the vessel to achieve that. Artistry, in its purest form, is an authentic gesture, so our approach continues to lean into that.
How do you cultivate great partnerships with your agency relations and align your goals with internal stakeholders?
Our clients, and their goals, are always at the center of everything we do. Every part of the process – from concept, deal-making, and campaign creative with brands, to agency relations, to aligning with internal stakeholders – is in service to the client and their vision. We choose our partners carefully and respect their values. The goal is always to create something lasting and meaningful for everyone involved.
Get to know the 2026 Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards Grand Jurors.