40 Under 40 2020: Lila Anton, Netflix Japan

Lila Anton

Creative marketing manager
Netflix
Japan

Born and raised in Japan to an African-American mother and a Jewish-American father from New York City who moved to Japan in 1975, Lila Anton embraces the cultures of both East and West and uniquely applies that mix to her work like few others can. After splitting her school years between Japan and the US, Anton taught multicultural education in Japan before beginning an 11-year career journey stateside in 2007. 

Five years later, Anton was global project manager for Apple product launch campaigns at TBWA Media Arts Lab. There she played a crucial role in creating amazing launch work while also ensuring local and minority perspectives and nuances were truly reflected and represented, receiving the prestigious Adcolor Rising Star Award. Anton then joined Beats by Dre at Apple, where she developed the brand's first campaign for Japan, which helped reverse a negative sales trend into 400% year-on-year sales growth. 

In 2018, Netflix hired Anton in Los Angeles, where she honed the intricacies of building the creative suites including trailers, teasers and all accompanying artwork for Netflix Originals, working with communications teams, showrunners and talent on all marketing output. Upon moving to Tokyo, where such a function did not exist, Anton worked tirelessly on her own to develop that capability from scratch. In just two years, Netflix Japan’s creative marketing function has seen a fivefold jump in productivity, with promotions for local Japanese series’ generating as much as 1.5 million views on YouTube. Such creative marketing successes have been instrumental for Netflix to overtake competitors in becoming a top livestreaming service in Japan.

Anton’s positivity, ingenuity and drive continues to make her stand out, whether its producing remote cross-Pacific film shoots during the pandemic, elevating Netflix’s internal diversity and inclusion dialogue or challenging business leaders to raise the bar.