Name: Lara Daniel
Company: Pulse Advertising
Position: Co-Founder
Website: https://www.pulse-advertising.com/
About Lara Daniel
I co-founded Pulse Advertising in 2014 alongside Chris Kastenholz, straight out of university, with no safety net and no Plan B. We are a global social media agency combining human creativity with AI-powered technology to deliver end-to-end solutions to turn engagement into transparent results.
We have since grown into a team of 125+ experts across 11 offices worldwide, working as one global unit to provide seamless, effective client support on both global and local levels.
The biggest challenge was building a market that didn’t yet exist – and building the technology infrastructure to support it. When we started, the word “”influencer”” wasn’t in the industry vocabulary. There were no benchmarks, no measurement frameworks, no data standards. We had to write the rulebook and build the tools at the same time.
We were also going up against the giants: WPP, Omnicom, Publicis – holding groups with decades of client relationships and institutional trust. Convincing global brands like Apple, Nestlé, and BlackRock to take a chance on a young, independent, tech-first agency required us to outthink and out-innovate, not outspend.
On a personal level, I had never founded a business before. Learning to hire, build culture, and lead people across 11 offices and multiple time zones, while simultaneously building proprietary technology – that is not something any MBA fully prepares you for.
We helped reshape influencer marketing from a niche experiment into a serious, performance-driven, technology-powered channel. At a time when the industry ran on gut feel and vanity metrics, we pushed for data accountability, AI-driven decision making, and transparent measurement – because social media deserves to be treated as rigorously as any other media channel.
That belief led us to build PI Metrics – Pulse Intelligence – our proprietary analytics platform. It uses AI to generate real-time insights across a brand’s entire social ecosystem: tracking which content drives value, which creator partnerships convert, and how every campaign decision connects to measurable revenue. It moves the question from “how many likes did we get?” to “how much business value did we create?” – and gives clients the tools to invest budgets strategically and measure impact continuously, not just at the end of a campaign.
We also integrated AI across our entire operating model: from AI-powered creator identification and semantic behaviour analysis, to automated content performance signals that feed directly into campaign optimisation. The result is a closed loop between data and creative decision-making that our competitors are still trying to catch up with.
Today, Pulse Advertising is one of the only remaining independent social media agencies operating at a truly global scale – 125+ people, 11 offices, clients across every major market. We proved that social strategy needs to be built and measured globally, not managed locally. Trends, communities, and algorithms do not respect borders – and neither does our technology.
Our currently active clients include: Google, Apple, BMW MINI, American Express, The North Face (VF Corp), Estée Lauder Companies, Coca Cola, Nestle and many more.
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