April, 2026.- In the dynamic 2026 advertising landscape, strategy has moved beyond a desk exercise to become an active cultural compass. Sonal Narain, the new Chief Strategy Officer at LePub Italy, arrives in Milan with an atypical background spanning everything from election campaigns and public policy to museum and destination branding. For Narain, data is not just numbers on a dashboard but “live datasets” found in every meme, ritual, and subculture. Her approach at LePub doesn’t just seek to respond to trends but to shape culture through a “cultural intelligence” that identifies universal tensions and translates them into bold creative acts. Under her leadership, strategy becomes an integrated system where effectiveness is not a post-campaign metric but the organizing principle dictating every move from the very first brief.
In this exclusive interview with Roastbrief, Sonal Narain breaks down how to balance data fluency with creative ambition so that global brands can travel successfully across local markets. From using behavioral psychology to ease the guilt of pet parents to creating platforms that challenge social norms of domestic optimization, Narain proposes a vision where advertising must solve real frictions in the physical world. Discover how her experience outside traditional agencies allows her to challenge the status quo and why, at LePub, the goal is clear: to design tangible behavioral shifts that ensure a brand matters today and becomes essential tomorrow.
1. The Intersection of Cultural Intelligence, Data Fluency, and Creative Ambition: Bruno Bertelli described the future of strategy as living at this intersection. How do you, as a strategist, balance these three forces in practice? Is there a natural tension between data and culture, and how do you resolve it?
Sonal Narain, Chief Strategy Officer, LePub Italy: There is no tension between data and culture; for me, culture is data. We have been conditioned to think of data as numbers in a dashboard, when in fact every meme, ritual, and subculture is a live dataset about what people value and how they behave. Brands have always grown by tapping into those cultural signals at the margins and scaling with them. Cultural intelligence is what helps us spot which conversations are emerging, growing and on the verge of the mainstream; data fluency is how we quantify their momentum and potential to scale. Our creative ambition then turns those culturally charged insights into bold acts and stories that allow the brand to grow with the culture, instead of just commenting on it from the sidelines.
2. Strategy as Growth Engine and Cultural Compass: You have said strategy must serve as both a “growth engine” and a “cultural compass.” Can you give an example of a campaign or project where you had to navigate both roles simultaneously? What did it require from you and your team?
S.N: A clear example is a past project with a leading pet nutrition brand, where we were tasked with a brief that was sharply focused on growth: accelerate salience and therefore growth. Our cultural starting point was the unspoken guilt of modern pet parents – the feeling that, however much you do, it never quite matches the love you get back, a very real emotion that the category’s glossy storytelling of happy healthy pets ignored.
We turned that tension into an organising idea: instead of pretending everything is perfect, the brand championed these moments using its science to help bridge the emotional gap. As a growth engine, that meant a platform built to travel across markets, drive trade sell‑in and justify a premium, with clear jobs for each touchpoint – from broad storytelling to guilt‑easing moments at point of sale and online. The campaign has driven breakthrough awareness and is already a finalist for one of the industry’s most pre-eminent awards for marketing effectiveness. Fingers crossed!
3. From Elections to Museums to Advertising: Your career has applied strategic thinking beyond advertising to election strategy, tourism, destination branding, public policy, and urban planning. How has working across such diverse fields shaped your approach to brand strategy? What do you bring to advertising that someone who has only worked in agencies might not?
S.N: The common thread across elections, museums, tourism and public policy is that none of them are selling ‘stuff’ in a narrow sense – they are all in the business of behavior change. Whether you are asking someone to vote differently, visit a city in the off-season or reimagine how they use public space you are trying to shift what people do. Working in those environments trained me to start every brief with a very simple question: what do we need people to do differently in the real world, and what is actually standing in their way? That means strategy has to be more than messages and media plans, strategy must define a clear shift, a direction and a lens through which we change behavior – eliminating frictions, creating social norms and providing behavioral nudges through more expansive thinking that influences design, innovation, placement, partnerships.
4. Shaping Change vs. Responding to Change: Bruno highlighted the opportunity to “build strategies that don’t just respond to change but actively shape it.” How do you, as a strategist, move from being reactive to proactive? What conditions need to be in place for strategy to actually shape culture rather than just follow it?
S.N.: For me, moving from reactive to proactive starts with asking not ‘what is trending?’ but ‘what needs to be true in culture for this brand to matter more tomorrow than it does today?’. In a previous role, I worked on a brand within the resealable household storage solutions category; here, we could have simply mirrored the declutter craze and sold more tidy pantries. Instead, we noticed the beginnings of a backlash – people quietly rebelling against the pressure to have a perfectly optimized, storage‑boxed life. That countercurrent led to a brand platform that does not just respond to the decluttering narrative but shifts culture towards a more forgiving idea that life is meant to be lived, not packed away.
5. The Italian Market, Global Ambition: You’re joining LePub Italy, based in Milan, but the agency works on global clients and campaigns. How do you balance deep local cultural fluency with the need to create work that travels across markets? What does that look like in your strategic process?
S.N.: At LePub the ambition is to ‘invent culture forward,’ so I think of strategy as defining one global truth that can wear many local accents. Practically, that starts with deep local immersion – talking to people, decoding codes, understanding what is uniquely local about a behavior – and then interrogating what part of that tension is universal. The universal piece becomes the spine of the platform; the local nuance comes from finding the culturally relevant expression of the universal tension or insight.
6. Embedding Effectiveness from the Outset: You have emphasized that “effectiveness is embedded from the outset, operating as one integrated system.” What does that mean for how you structure your strategy team, collaborate with creative, and measure success? How do you ensure effectiveness isn’t an afterthought?
S.N.:For me, embedding effectiveness starts with a simple discipline: every business or brand objective needs to be translated into a concrete behavior-change brief. What do people need to start, stop or continue doing for us to achieve this goal? Once we are clear on that, it becomes the organising principle for everything else – the creative task, the channel strategy, the customer journey and, crucially, the KPIs. Instead of briefing ‘awareness’ or ‘consideration’ in the abstract, we brief creatives on the specific behavior shift(s) we are designing for by channel, and we build measurement around those same behaviors. The final question is always: did people actually do something differently because of this work, and did it add up to the growth we were aiming for?
