Naterra International, Inc.

Lauren Lane is Associate Director of Media and Digital Marketing at Naterra International, Inc., where she leads data-driven media strategy, digital marketing and performance optimization. Passionate about measurement, creative storytelling and leadership, she helps brands drive growth while mentoring the next generation of marketing professionals.

Teaching the Thinking Behind the Work

I came up doing the work - building the campaigns, pulling my own reports, learning the hard way that a beautiful media plan means nothing if you can't explain what it actually did. That shaped how I lead; I don't ask my team to do anything I haven't done (or wouldn't) myself. And when someone brings me a recommendation, I'm less interested in whether it turns out to be perfect than in whether they can walk me through the thinking behind it. A well-reasoned idea that misses still teaches us something, but a lucky guess teaches us nothing.

It also made me allergic to handwaving. When you've owned real budgets with real consequences, you learn that "the campaign performed well" is not a sentence. My leadership style is essentially teaching people to finish that sentence and giving them enough room to be wrong safely while they learn how.

Earning Attention in a Fragmented World

Fragmentation gets all the headlines, but honestly, the harder problem is measurement. Every platform will happily take credit for the same sale, and if you add up the dashboards, your brand apparently grew 400 percent last year. The real challenge is building a measurement POV you actually believe, especially for brands like ours that sell through retail rather than direct-to-consumer, where the purchase happens somewhere your pixel can't see.

The second challenge is attention. Audiences aren't hard to reach; they're hard to deserve. Part of deserving them is speaking to consumers the way they need to be spoken to, not just the way we as brands want to speak to them. It's tempting to show up everywhere with the same polished, brand-safe, approved message, but the person scrolling TikTok at midnight and the person comparing products in a retailer's app are completely different people in completely different mindsets, and they can smell a repurposed ad from a mile away. The brands winning right now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets but the ones humble enough to adapt their voice to the moment, and whose content people would have stopped for anyway.

“Emotion Does The Selling And Data Does The Steering.”

When Creativity Leads and Data Guides

The question I get asked most is ‘How do you balance creative storytelling with data-driven marketing strategies?’ and my answer is always the same: for me it's less about balance and more about sequence. They don't compete; they take turns. Data tells you where to show up, when, and for whom, but creative decides whether anyone cares once you're there. What still surprises people is just how much it decides. Creative will swing performance harder than any bidding strategy or audience tweak, yet it's usually the first thing teams assume is fine and the last thing anyone digs into.

My philosophy is that emotion does the selling and data does the steering. We've built creative frameworks around how a product makes someone feel rather than its ingredient list, then used performance data to learn which expressions of that feeling resonate with which audiences. Essentially, we let the creative write the story and the data edit it.

The Next Frontier of Digital Marketing

Retail media has outgrown its reputation as a cost of doing business. It's a legitimate full-funnel channel now, and the brands planning it with the same rigor as any other media investment will compound that advantage. But as more dollars flow into these networks, the measurement question gets harder to ignore: retail media platforms are essentially grading their own homework, reporting back ROAS on shoppers who were already standing in the aisle.

The brands that will win here are the ones pushing past simply looking at the platform-reported numbers and asking what those dollars actually changed—incremental sales, new buyers, category growth—because that's the difference between funding a channel and funding a receipt.

The other one I'm watching closely is what AI is doing to search. When discovery shifts from ten blue links to a single synthesized answer at the very top of a page, the playbook splits in two: traditional SEO still matters, but a second discipline is emerging in answer engine optimization - making sure your brand is what the AI cites, recommends, and pulls from when someone asks, what's the best body scrub.

You can't buy your way into the answer in a straightforward sense the way you could buy your way to the top of a results page, which means brands actually have to earn the recommendation. Marketers who only optimize for the old search results page are quickly optimizing for a shrinking room.

Master the Craft before You Lead

Learn the platforms yourself before you try to direct anyone else inside them. Build a campaign, break a report, sit in the ads console long enough to understand why something costs what it costs. I've watched plenty of smart strategies fall apart in a meeting because the person presenting never actually touched the thing they were presenting on. There's no substitute for having done it, and frankly, it makes you a much harder person to BS.

Second: learn measurement deeply, even if it's not your favorite subject. The marketer who can explain why the numbers say what they say will always out-earn the one who can only read them off a dashboard.

And finally, stay curious about the parts of the business that aren't yours. Some of the best marketing decisions I've made came from building relationships with and understanding sales, supply chain and retail dynamics. The channel expertise gets you in the door, but it's the business fluency and your willingness to learn outside of your bubble that gets you the seat at the table.