# Lauren Papon

Lauren Papon is a creative strategist focused on helping direct-to-consumer brands improve paid social ads through research, testing, and iteration.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/lauren-papon/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-papon
- LinkedIn followers: 907
- Topics: paid-ads, creative-testing, performance-marketing, career-development
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-09-30

## Summary

Useful for a repeatable paid-social creative testing method for DTC brands.

- Best for: A DTC brand wanting a method and defined learning output, not ad volume.
- Not for: Campaigns needing documented client results, named brand engagements, or guaranteed performance.
- Check first: Ask directly about commercial terms, deliverables, and evidence of prior client results.

### Takeaways

- Creative strategy should run as research, hypothesis, test, learn, and iterate.
- The next ad idea is already inside the ad account.
- Papon recommends drawing on past creative performance, market research, and actual buyers.

## Main ideas

- **Paid social is the channel worth staffing a creative strategist for**: Lauren Papon argues that every DTC brand needs a dedicated creative strategist because paid social ads are the fastest way to test creative, learn from real consumer behaviour, and scale what works. They contrast paid social's leverage with commercials, billboards, and magazine ads, which they describe as far less powerful now. A strategist, in this framing, asks the questions brands otherwise skip: why an ad worked, what patterns the account shows, who is actually buying, and what the data says to test next. Each ad becomes an opportunity to learn rather than a one-off bet.
- **Creative should run as research, hypothesis, test, learn, iterate**: Lauren Papon argues that sporadic creative — founders making ads occasionally and seeing what happens — is a bad strategy. They recommend a sequence: gather evidence, form a hypothesis, produce researched creative at volume, test, learn, and iterate on and scale the winners. The evidence comes from past creative performance, market research, and the brand's actual buyers. Volume matters, but only when it's informed by research; the post draws a line between scaled testing and, in their words, 'random sh*t'. They also allow for ads that fail despite the research, treating failure as part of the process rather than a reason to stop.
- **The next ad idea is already inside the ad account**: A recurring argument is that deciding what to make next starts with reviewing existing performance, not a blank page. Lauren Papon tells readers to look for messaging that keeps winning, parts of ads that consistently underperform, ideal customer profiles that keep appearing, and gaps between them. The underlying claim is that no ad is wasted because each one provides clarity; the 'secret sauce' is in the patterns. The point is to reduce guesswork and work from evidence.
- **Put yourself in the rooms you want to be in**: Alongside the craft advice is a focus on environment and self-investment: Lauren Papon writes that your environment shapes your life and advises putting yourself in the rooms you want to be in 'even if you don't feel ready yet,' concluding that being ready is a decision, not a feeling. The Cannes Lions recap puts this into practice: they attended the festival without a pass to join the conversations they wanted to be part of, and chose the rooms deliberately.
- **Building a career in public while doing the work**: One post is a career-journey piece rather than advice: creative strategist by day, bartender by night, describing the transition between a current job and a career being built. Lauren Papon says they do not want to go back to bartending, but treat the unwanted work as fuel to go all in, committing to 'full throttle on creative strategy, content creation, and building the life I actually want.' The post conveys commitment and momentum, and asks who else is building something outside a nine-to-five.

## Work to read

- [Research, hypothesis, test, learn, iterate: the creative process that replaces guessing](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lauren-papon_creativestrategy-paidsocial-dtc-activity-7498816646501924864-6LrI)
- [Spot the patterns before choosing the next ad](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lauren-papon_creativestrategy-dtc-paidsocial-activity-7500220946419437568-gRWh)
- [Why a dedicated creative strategist pays off in paid social](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lauren-papon_creativestrategy-creativestrategist-paidsocial-activity-7503150656271040512-lwy-)
- [Creative strategist by day, bartender by night: building a career in public](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lauren-papon_creativestrategy-performancemarketing-dtc-activity-7481055829933334528-L3-l)
- [Cannes Lions without a pass: learning by putting yourself in the room](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lauren-papon_canneslions2026-canneslions-creativestrategy-activity-7477390518302457856-m9sf)

## Brand relationships

- **Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity** (mention)
- **Dark Room** (mention)
- **Triple Whale** (mention)
- **Manychat** (mention)
- **Wispr Flow** (mention)
- **Motion (Creative Analytics)** (mention)
- **The Female Quotient** (mention)

## Partnerships

Lauren Papon's posts disclose no partnership or sponsorship offer, rate card, formats, sponsorship policy or inquiry route. The five posts cover paid-social creative-strategy commentary and one personal career note. Triple Whale, Manychat, Wispr Flow, Motion, The Female Quotient and Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity appear as event rooms, a creative-analytics tool and people met at the festival—not as disclosed paid partnerships. A buyer cannot confirm deliverables, exclusivity, usage window, turnaround or pricing from the posts. Ask directly for available formats and commercial terms.

## Alternatives

- Terri Holley: Choose Terri Holley when the bottleneck is creator supply behind the ads, not reading the ad account. Their posts describe working brand-side to source and hire creators, build creative strategy and mentor new talent, with brief and script writing named as the skills that improved most. They also run a free training framework, 60 Days to UGC, built around a nine-module Brand-Ready Lab, and say their UGC creator community passed 250 people. Two details make them a closer match than Lauren Papon for some brands: recent creative strategy work with food and skincare clients, the same DTC territory as a targeted creator program, and work on performance-based creator compensation as a vetted partner on a creator platform. Brands seeking a targeted creator program assembled and run, rather than a testing method applied to their own account, are nearer that brief.
- Jerry Novick: Choose Jerry Novick when the team wants numbers attached to the diagnosis. Their posts give explicit thresholds to steer testing: hook rate of 30% or above, hold rate over 20%, click-through rate of 2% or above, with 3% and higher getting special attention, conversion rate of 4% or higher, ROAS above 2.5 and ideally above 3.0, and a frequency signal around 3 as the point to refresh creative. They also give a decision rule for each pattern: iterate on concepts where hook and hold rates are strong but conversion or ROAS underperform, and cut or deprioritise concepts whose hook fails regardless of what happens downstream. One post breaks down a single ad, identifying the two elements that stopped the scroll and defining the hook's job as the first three seconds, with a good thumb-stop rate at 30% or above. Brands seeking a scored diagnostic of existing creative before funding more production are better served here.
- Waleed Bin Wasim: Choose Waleed Bin Wasim when ROAS falls as spend rises and creative-to-audience fit is the suspected cause. One post examines a hair care brand that arrived asking about scaling tactics; the review found most creative spoke to existing customers, warm audiences and product-aware buyers, with only around a quarter built for new customers. The argument is that scaling requires creative for each awareness level, from unaware through ready to buy: a retargeting ad, product reminder and testimonial each do a different job from a cold-audience or education-led ad. The question shifts from how to scale to whether the creative funnel needed to scale exists. The same body of work covers positioning, with a specific version of the point: an offer that takes thirty seconds to explain loses to one that names the problem in a line. Brands wanting the leak located at the message and funnel level before making more ads are a closer fit.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/