New Zealand-native Lauren Pedersen left her home country after high school to study in the US. After completing a degree in communications, marketing and graphic design at American University, she went straight into working for big marketing agencies in the US and then London—working on a diverse mix of brand accounts like Advil, Chapstick, AOL and MasterCard International.

Fourteen years ago, Lauren moved to Norway where she shifted her focus to work with startup and scale-up businesses. Her career journey in Oslo started at Opera Software, where she spent nearly five years in various managerial marketing roles. Lauren was then part of the team that launched Instabank, a new digital bank in the Nordics, taking on the position of chief marketing officer. Currently, Lauren leads a team of 14 marketers at Airthings, a Norwegian-founded company manufacturing radon detectors and indoor air quality monitors.

As the CMO, one of Lauren’s key focuses is on education-based marketing by raising awareness around the importance of indoor air quality to people around the world. Their educational campaigns include a content partnership with the American Lung Association where they released a report on the importance of air quality in schools, as well as being the official air quality partner of the Champions Chess Tour.

Airthings has also started an initiative called Air for Kids, a website developed purely for educational purposes. The company now has the goal of educating over a million kids around the importance of good air quality. 

“Content marketing can be time-consuming, and it can be difficult to make it local and relevant. So you have to have an overall strategy about what you’re trying to achieve.”

During the interview with Kyler Canastra, Lauren spoke about how education-based marketing plays a key role in startups, how she leads her team and the importance of understanding numbers in marketing.


You can watch the full conversation in the video above or on YouTube, and listen to the podcast on Apple or Spotify.

Rapid-fire recs  

  • Recommended reading: 
    • How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee: “This book is about helping people understand the carbon footprint of everything we do. So it tells you what the carbon footprint is for a banana versus taking a flight to New York, for example. And that’s something that I think everyone in the world should be aware of.”
  • Source of inspiration: 
    • Everyone around you. “I think it’s super important to take in the best of the people that are always around you and learn from all of them. I simply don’t think there’s one person who’s the perfect role model, you have to pull the best parts out of all the people you meet along the way.”

Connect with Lauren and Kyler on LinkedIn.

For more on education-based marketing:

To read the full transcript, click on page number 2 below.

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