Laurel Kaye

Laurel Kaye is Chief Client Officer at Brainlabs UK, responsible for new partnerships and enterprise growth. She brings over 18 years of media agency experience and a track record of guiding brands through transformation to improve performance and deliver exceptional client service scores. She has led both multi-brand portfolios and single-brand engagements, aligning strategy, media, and measurement to commercial outcomes. Today Laurel focuses on uncovering the insights, innovations, and technology that unlock sustainable growth for clients.

What do you think the biggest challenges are currently facing the industry?

The first is measurement. Finance no longer accepts last-click attribution, but the industry has not agreed on what replaces it. Marketers are being asked to prove contribution margin, payback period and true incrementality with tools that were designed for a click-driven world. At Brainlabs we partnered with Ebiquity to push the digital audit standard from cheap impressions to quality outcomes, because the gap between what marketers report and what finance trusts is the single biggest threat to long-term media investment.    The second is AI. The opportunity is real, but most of the industry is automating tasks rather than rethinking the work. The agencies that win will use AI to react to competitor activity in real time, scale creative without diluting brand, and free planners to do the strategic thinking only humans can do well.     The third is talent. We are training planners for a market that will look nothing like the one they joined. The gap between platform expertise and commercial fluency is the single biggest risk to the next generation of media leaders, and closing it has to be a deliberate act of investment, not an afterthought.