Somewhere along the way, I realized the team mattered more than the campaign.

I'm Anna Son, and almost nothing about my path was planned. I was born and raised in South Korea and came up the whole way through its education system, which is every bit as demanding as its reputation. When I finally went abroad, it wasn't with family money or a safety net behind me. It was to change the course of my life. I spent a year and a half in England learning English at my aunt's kitchen table, then signed myself up for an exchange program in Mississippi. During that one semester I talked my way into the university's MBA program, earned a scholarship, and finished the degree in a single year.

I graduated in 2009, into the worst US economy in decades, and moved to Michigan, one of the hardest-hit states in the country, to see if a foreign student could find a way in. My visa was running out, so I started waiting tables at a Japanese restaurant while I planned my trip home to Korea. One shift, a customer asked where I was from and what I was doing there. It turned out he was building a company right across the street, funded and powered by Korean technology, and he needed someone bilingual to help him build it. That is how my career began: by accident, and by being willing to talk to a stranger.

I became the connective tissue for that brand-new manufacturing company, translating across cultures on everything from construction to training local engineers to R&D. It taught me the lesson that has held true in every job since: the hardest problems in a company are almost never technical. They are human.

Then came the range. I was the only bilingual marketer inside one of Korea's largest electronics companies, balancing two completely different ways of working. I moved to Estée Lauder and had to assimilate into another world entirely, learning to move across brands and functions until I was leading my own initiative and reporting to the CMO and president. Same title, marketer, in cultures that could not have been more different.

Then I went looking for the opposite of a corporation and joined a European tech startup building out a new marketing team in New York. I built its digital marketing from the ground up and helped turn it into a community-driven brand, with some of the biggest artist campaigns it had ever run. It thrived through the pandemic, and then, once the world reopened, the office was dismantled anyway. My next chapter taught me the other side of that coin: a private-equity-owned business with new stakeholders and a different idea of what marketing was for, where I carried the team through layoffs and restructuring, stepped in as interim CMO, and kept everyone intact through all of it.

By then I had built and led marketing inside a Korean manufacturer, a global electronics giant, an American beauty empire, a European startup, and a private-equity turnaround. Different countries, different industries, wildly different ideas of what marketing was even for, each with its own culture and its own dynamics. That is the real thing I carry out of all of it: I have almost certainly seen a version of whatever your team is facing, and I know how to read the people underneath it. Whatever situation you are in, I can probably help.

These days, working between San Francisco and Berlin, that is exactly what I do: advisory that helps marketing leaders build teams that hold together and do their best work. And when a team needs the marketing itself built and run rather than advised on, that is a separate craft, the one I founded nono collective for.