Rebecca Nadilo has spent two decades shaping stories. But the question that matters more to her than how a story is told is who gets to tell it.
Across a career in strategy and creative partnerships, now as Marketing Partnerships Creative Lead across APAC at Netflix, she has watched narratives about women take shape in rooms where too few women were present.
Rebecca carries an understated authority. She holds a room with presence rather than volume, and she is devoted to what that authority demands of her. When you are given the floor, she believes, your responsibility is to examine the integrity of the story, the limits of your own perspective, and whose experience you are speaking for.
A project for Lux brought those questions into sharp focus. While reviewing a focus group transcript, Rebecca encountered the words of a woman in rural India who described a single bar of Lux soap as her perfume, her skincare, her beauty routine, and her makeup. Everything she associated with beauty was contained in that one small object.
For Rebecca, the insight was immediate and humbling. Through a privileged lens, an investment in beauty could easily be dismissed as vanity. For this woman, it was a source of confidence, power, and self-expression.
That understanding became the foundation for Lux’s platform of unapologetic beauty. It also required Rebecca to recognize that her role was not to impose meaning on the woman’s experience, but to listen closely enough for its meaning to emerge.
The project reinforced a distinction that has become central to Rebecca’s work: the difference between observing someone’s experience and understanding it from within. You can bring empathy, curiosity, and care to another person’s story. But when you have not lived it, there are limits to what you can claim to know.
I completely abandoned my own experience, my own perspectives and opinions — recognizing that I’m not the target audience. I just opened myself up to the viewpoints of these women.
A few years later, that distinction became personal.
Rebecca and her friend Ellie had both been made redundant. Together, they started a podcast, The Full Timers Club, and spoke about the experience through the lens of being women, wives, and mothers: the disorientation, the loss of identity, and the particular weight of trying to rebuild while caring for children.
Responses poured in from women who said they finally felt seen.
Until then, Rebecca had believed she understood redundancy. She knew it was difficult. She could imagine the disruption. But living through it revealed the distance between empathy and experience.
“You can observe,” she says. “You can try to empathize. But you can never truly understand what you haven’t lived.”
It changed the way she thought about every story shaped by experiences that belong to a body or a life other than her own: fertility, motherhood, grief, loss. The responsibility, she believes, is to ensure that the people who have lived those experiences are present in the room and involved in authoring the story.
That belief also shapes the way Rebecca thinks about power in the creative industry. Women are increasingly visible in the stories audiences see, but they remain underrepresented among the people deciding which stories are made and how they are told.
She is candid about where the industry stands. Only 36% of creative directors are female—a chasm, rather than a gap.
Much of the progress Rebecca admires has come from women refusing to wait for permission. She points to Jan Fran and Antoinette Lattouf who founded ETTE media in Australia to offer an alternative to the big news corporations, Reese Witherspoon building her own production company, and Palestinian American filmmaker Cherien Dabis writing, directing, and starring in work that might otherwise never have been commissioned.
In each case, women responded to exclusion by creating the structures they needed to tell their own stories.
Rebecca sees reason for optimism. At Netflix, she works in an environment where women occupy some of the most influential content leadership roles. But she is equally clear that progress is uneven, and that visibility at the top does not automatically transform every part of an industry.
What matters is creating more than a handful of exceptional women. It is reaching the point where women no longer have to see themselves as the anomaly in the room.
If you can’t see it, you can’t be it. We need momentum, we need role models, and we need more than anything, I think, normalization.
Normalization, in Rebecca’s view, is built through accumulation. Each woman who is trusted with a story, promoted into a decision-making role, or publicly recognized for her work makes it easier for the next woman to imagine herself there.
That is why her advice to women still finding their voice is: find your allies.
When you are the exception in the room, she says, you need people who will open doors and keep them open. People who will champion your work, put your name forward, and remind you of your ability when your own belief falters. And, once you have found your footing, the responsibility shifts. You become that person for someone else.
That cycle of support matters because Rebecca is candid about the fact that conviction does not eliminate doubt. She has questioned whether she deserved opportunities. There are moments when self-belief disappears, and she has to summon it through a hard conversation with herself: you have raised a child, you have done difficult things, you have earned the right to trust what you know.
Rebecca reminds us to draw strength from our closest circle. People willing to offer reassurance, perspective, or, when necessary, the verbal equivalent of a slap across the face. Sometimes we just need to hear: why are you even questioning yourself?
For Rebecca, self-belief is less a permanent state than something sustained collectively. It is strengthened by people who see your ability clearly when you temporarily cannot.
Rebecca feels most powerful in her work when she can be completely herself. Authenticity, for her, is the condition under which real work becomes possible. The easier path, she says, can be to “relax your own principles, your convictions or your integrity” in order to get ahead or move something forward.
But that is precisely the bargain she wants women to resist and show that integrity and conviction are always the number one thing.
Rebecca is drawn to women who have done exactly that: women with a clear point of view and the willingness to use their platform even when the position they take may be unpopular. They offer proof that integrity is not something women must surrender in exchange for a meaningful career.
Her mark is an olive branch. A family totem she already sports as a tattoo. The symbol connects her to her husband’s Lebanese heritage and to a region whose suffering weighs heavily on her. For Rebecca, the branch holds the values she has returned to throughout her life and work: integrity, conviction, and the strength to keep her beliefs intact.
It also holds the thing she wants most. Peace.
HerMark is a visual and narrative study of women shaping the marketing, advertising, and communications industry. Branding in Asia is publishing the ongoing series in partnership with HerMark.
Learn more at hermark.world
