Silicon Valley’s Most Sought-After Brand Strategists | First CMO for YouTube, Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Discord & more | Advertising Age & BrandWeek Marketer of the Year (San Francisco, USA)
She is as elite as it gets. Branding expert extraordinaire. And oh boy, where do we even start?
Before YouTube became YouTube, before Airbnb meant more than crashing on someone’s couch, before platforms like Discord, Dropbox or Reddit turned into cultural infrastructure, this extraordinary woman was their CMO and already doing their branding architecture of today: defining brand position, tone and go-to-market logic that actually matters. Many of those brands haven’t fundamentally changed since — which tells you everything about the strength of the foundations she sets, and why, in today’s branding renaissance, she remains one of the few branding experts founders turn to when clarity matters more than noise.
As the first Head of Marketing and Communications for YouTube, Julie Supan helped officially launch the platform in 2005 and shape its identity during its meteoric rise, all the way through its $1.6B acquisition by Google. And that was just the beginning. Her work never stops at logos or campaigns. She builds meaning, narrative and trust at scale, leading branding, communications, grassroots marketing, policy and cultural partnerships at a time when the internet itself is being invented in real time. The industry notices — Advertising Age and BrandWeek name her Marketer of the Year — but Supan keeps doing the work, not the victory laps.
And if you thought this was enough of a flex, think again. This year, branding once again moved to the centre of business strategy after years of performance-first thinking, and Supan is the one founders and CEOs call to elevate their brands when the stakes are high. Not all companies get to work with her though — Supan works with only a handful of companies per year, helping them find their branding position, define their audience and launch with confidence in brutally competitive spaces. A longtime guest lecturer at Stanford GSB and advisor to top VC firms, Julie Supan talks about branding as architecture as opposed to decoration — and at DK2026, she brings that elite branding logic behind the world’s biggest platforms to the stage in Rovinj.
Julie Supan: The Vision Advantage of Branding
When the world gets loud, the brands that last don’t get louder — they get clearer. And their vision speaks. At DK2026, Julie Supan takes us back to the moments before YouTube, Airbnb, Dropbox or Reddit brands became what they are today. In those early, uncertain moments — when the internet was still being invented and nothing was obvious — she shows how vision, backed by intention, shaped brands that would outlive trends, hype and noise. Through raw lessons from the front lines of building huge brands, Supan will reveal how clarity becomes direction, direction becomes momentum and why the strongest brands don’t chase attention, but quietly pull people toward a future they want to belong to. If you want to learn about long term branding architecture thinking from the woman behind some of the most valuable brands in the world, this is THE talk for you.
