Before Sandra Lee had clients, she had teammates. As a junior-high student, she played on the after-school volleyball team at Koreatown Youth and Community Center. Years later, when she joined the organization's executive board, that was the memory she chose to share. A professional biography might have started with her advertising agency. Lee started with what the neighborhood had given her.
Today she is a vice president of KYCC's board and the founder, president and CEO of ES Advertising in Los Angeles. The two roles make an interesting pair. One asks how an organization can serve its neighbors. The other asks how a brand can earn their attention. In both settings, knowing the people involved seems a sensible place to begin.
There is a temptation, in writing about advertising, to describe everyone as a storyteller. The word is generous enough to accommodate almost anybody with a presentation. Lee's career offers something more concrete: an agency established in 1999, a sustained place in Asian American advertising, and a set of community commitments that extend beyond a campaign's closing report.
The team before the title
Lee's return to KYCC is particularly revealing because it reaches back past her professional credentials. She remembered the volleyball program as a positive outlet during junior high and described the opportunity to give back as personally meaningful. The organization was part of her life before it became a board responsibility. That gives her leadership role a history that no appointment announcement could manufacture.
KYCC's present board brings together people from banking, property, energy, advertising and other fields. Lee serves alongside board president Vivian Kim of Hanmi Bank and fellow vice president Ted Kim of KAPE Technologies. Advertising executive Nita Song is also a director. These are working connections within a neighborhood institution, rather than a list of names assembled for a conference badge.
The center itself has grown from a focus on the Korean American community to serving residents across greater Koreatown. That broader remit offers a useful parallel to the questions Lee addresses professionally: how to keep a community's particular experience in view while making room for people beyond its original boundaries. Membership can widen without making the original connection meaningless.
“Since junior high, KYCC has been a meaningful part of my life.”
Sandra Lee, on joining KYCC's executive team
A volleyball team is a modest beginning for an executive profile. It is also a helpful corrective to the usual procession of titles. Institutions often enter a child's life through an ordinary afternoon. Their significance becomes easier to recognize much later, when that child is deciding where to spend her own time.
1999, and a market with many names
ES Advertising was established in 1999. Earlier in her career, Lee worked at Cheil, including its headquarters and western U.S. operations. Her academic background is in Communication Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Those details place her career at an intersection of corporate advertising, communication and the practical work of reaching people across cultures.
The agency was formerly known as Ethnic Solutions. The earlier name makes its specialization unusually plain. A 2010-11 industry directory already listed Lee as president and CEO, with ES working in the Asian American market. This was a business with an established place in the field long before today's conversations about which platform might replace yesterday's favorite.
Its industry membership profile spells out the audiences more carefully: Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Hispanic, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese population groups. It describes both consumer and business marketing, with national and local service. The list is worth pausing over. A single umbrella term can make a market look simple; naming its constituent communities restores some of the complexity.
Seven population groups named in ES Advertising's 3AF member profile.
For Lee, the business has involved explaining that complexity to large organizations. Her 2018 civic appointment biography described work educating Fortune 500 corporations about multicultural markets. It also named clients including Bank of the West, California Bank & Trust, Disney Home Entertainment and Hite Jinro America. The range matters: a bank and an entertainment company do not arrive with interchangeable problems.
ES now offers research, strategy, production, media, public relations, social media and events. Its work runs in two directions: helping U.S. brands reach multicultural consumers and helping international brands enter the United States. The common task is making a message intelligible and relevant in the place where somebody will actually encounter it.
A whiskey brief with room for a chef
One 2025 project gives that approach a tangible form. ES worked on a Jack Daniel's Single Barrel campaign aimed at Asian communities, collaborating with Korean American chef Kevin Lee on a Lunar New Year promotion combining Korean food and whiskey. Korean tattoo artist Wooj contributed to special packaging. The creative choices put recognizable people and practices inside the campaign.
Food, an artist and a seasonal gathering provide several ways into a product. They also make the brief more interesting than the instruction to reach a demographic. A demographic cannot cook dinner. A chef can. The distinction is small enough to sound obvious and useful enough to deserve a place in the meeting.
Lee has described continuing to study digital marketing and seeking ideas from younger colleagues. She also pays attention to advertisements while watching YouTube, examining their intent and delivery. There is something pleasantly occupational about that habit. The rest of us may be counting the seconds until the skip button appears; an advertising executive can find another example to consider.
The rooms beyond the agency
Lee's industry service has been unusually sustained. She has served on the Asian American Advertising Federation's board since 2011, and the federation currently lists her as treasurer. The organization brings together agencies, marketers, media businesses and researchers. Its remit includes education and advocacy for the Asian American consumer, giving the work a collective setting beyond any one firm's accounts.
A treasurer's title supplies less glamour than a creative reel. It also points toward the maintenance that professional communities require. Conferences need organizations behind them. Education needs continuity. An industry that wants clients to take its audiences seriously benefits from people willing to keep its own institutions functioning. Lee's long association places her inside that less photogenic part of the business.
Her civic record includes service as a commissioner of the Los Angeles City Employees' Retirement System from 2018 to 2022, followed by service on the city's tourism commission in 2022-23. These were public responsibilities alongside her agency career. The retirement system's scale, described in her professional biography as exceeding $20 billion, belonged to the institution and its board's oversight.
Another entry takes her considerably farther from Wilshire Boulevard. In 2014, she participated as an international observer in El Salvador's presidential election, representing a California delegation. It is a striking detail in an advertising executive's record: a reminder that public participation can take forms far removed from the profession printed beneath a person's name.
From cable television to KakaoTalk
In 2014, Lee appeared on a consumer marketing and sales roundtable at The Cable Show in Los Angeles. Other participants included executives from REVOLT TV, NUVOtv and Comcast Cable. The subject was reaching multicultural viewers as the television environment changed. Even the setting carries a little period atmosphere: an industry gathering organized around cable, with audience habits already in motion.
By September 2025, her conference agenda included Rednote and KakaoTalk. At 3AF's Asian Marketing Summit, she joined a session on those platforms with Peter Keum of Admaru and Yuxuan “Henry” Xiao of AC Marketing. The change in proper nouns tells part of the career story. Keeping the same specialty has required following audiences into different places.
She also joined CBB Bank's Ted Chung for “Beyond the Base,” a session about the bank's move from a Korean American business clientele toward a broader multicultural audience. The case centered on customer experience, digital fluency, personalized service and community stories. It offered a practical question for a specialist: how does a business expand its welcome while retaining the relationships that gave it a beginning?
Lee's own education has continued alongside that changing agenda. Her credentials include a Leadership Decision Making program at Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education in 2021 and Digital Marketing Strategies at Kellogg Executive Education in 2023. These are executive education credentials. Their place in an established founder's record makes continued study visible as an activity rather than a slogan.
What comes back around
The public recognition includes ES Advertising's inclusion in Agency Spotter's Top 50 Marketing Agencies in January 2020 and Lee's selection for Women We Admire's Top 50 Women Leaders of Los Angeles in 2022. The latter placed her in a citywide group spanning many professions. Both distinctions belong in her record, alongside the less ceremonial evidence of years spent operating and serving.
She is also listed as a trustee at St. James' School and joined the Council of Korean Americans in 2023. These affiliations extend the picture of an executive whose public life includes education, professional organizations and local institutions. The agency is the central occupation. It is one part of the calendar.
Lee's story comes back most clearly to KYCC. A young person joins an after-school team. An adult with an agency to run returns with experience to contribute. There is no need to make the volleyball court a secret explanation for every later achievement. Its value is simpler: Lee remembered a place that helped her, and made room to help it in return.