Vol 35. Insights from Dreamday and Quality Media founder Lauren Kleinman

Case Studied Experts
Meet Lauren Kleinman

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their career, insights, and accomplishments. This week, that marketing leader is Lauren Kleinman, founder of Dreamday and co-founder of Quality Media.

Lauren is an operator who went from early-stage brand builder to two-time agency founder. She helped scale Ritual into a category-defining wellness brand, built acquisition strategies that became industry playbooks, and then left the brand side to create the agencies she always wished existed. Today, both Dreamday and Quality Media are among the fastest-growing firms in the country.

Here are the need-to-knows about Lauren:

• After a 3+ year run at Ritual, the company became a client of both Lauren’s agencies, helping fuel their scale to over $250 million in annual revenue with the leading prenatal vitamin on Amazon.

• She was one of the first fifteen employees at Scopely, supporting their growth from 15 employees to 500+ and becoming one of the world’s biggest mobile gaming companies.

• She now leads Dreamday and Quality Media, both named Inc. 5000 and Ad Age fastest-growing agencies in 2025, serving industry leaders like Amazon, AG1, Quince, ILIA, Grüns, Ruggable, goop, HelloFresh, Ghia, and more.

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Early entrepreneurial instincts

Long before her marketing career started, Lauren was already building. “I was importing razor scooters, Tamagotchis, and inflatable sofas when I was 11 or 12,” she said. 

“I’d ride around the mall, hand out business cards, and host bake sales. I turned my garage into a school and tutored kids in my neighborhood.”

Lauren grew up surrounded by entrepreneurs and always gravitated toward creating something from scratch. After graduating from USC with a communications degree and a minor in entrepreneurship, her first job was at StartEngine, a startup accelerator. In her role there, she supported 40+ budding young companies and gained access to one of LA’s strongest mentor networks.

Two of those mentors ended up hiring her for her next roles, reinforcing a pattern her career would repeat often: proximity creates opportunity.

Learning speed and scale at Scopely

Her next chapter took her to Scopely, where she was among the earliest employees.

“I was doing a lot: PR, corporate comms, events, recruiting, special projects for the CEO,” she said. “I wasn’t a huge gamer, but being part of a rocket ship was an incredible experience.”

Scopely’s hypergrowth shaped her view on leadership. One takeaway in particular stuck with her. “The best CEOs I’ve worked for were relentless and had a laser-focused vision. And their vision largely stays the same from day one to year five.”

That clarity would later become foundational to how she built her agencies.

Joining Ritual’s mission 

Lauren first met Ritual founder Kat Schneider through LA’s tech community. When Kat asked her what vitamins she took, something clicked.

“I was taking vitamins every day and couldn’t name a single brand. No trust. No loyalty. Just a product I was consuming every day and couldn’t remember the name of.”

Lauren joined Ritual as VP of Marketing and Founding Team as the third full-time employee and first marketing hire. Leaving Scopely—a stable, high-growth company—was daunting, but Ritual’s mission in women’s health resonated.

Ritual’s growth exploded. The company built a loved, trusted brand and scaled into a category leader. Lauren helped lead everything from brand development and positioning to press and communications. She spearheaded Ritual’s influencer and creator strategy, their affiliate and commerce programs, and brokered bespoke top-performing partnerships to help scale their performance and acquisition channels. 

Years after Lauren left, Ritual became a Dreamday and Quality Media client. It was a full-circle moment she describes as “incredible.”

Leaving brand side to build agencies

Many marketers follow the path of leaving agency life for brand roles. Lauren did the reverse. Why? Because she kept encountering the same problem.

“I worked with the top PR agencies and top performance agencies. And they just weren’t evolving fast enough,” she said. “I couldn’t find an affiliate agency I trusted with Ritual’s brand.”

She realized there was a massive white space:

• PR wasn’t adapting to modern publishers.

• Affiliate marketing was undervalued and poorly executed.

• Agencies weren’t integrating brand integrity, data, and performance.

So she left Ritual and built Dreamday, followed by Quality Media with her former Ritual colleague, Lee Joselowtiz. What was meant to be a side passion project became one of the fastest-growing performance marketing agencies in the U.S.

A single philosophy powering two businesses

Dreamday is Lauren’s PR and affiliate agency. It’s home of Performance PR, a model she coined in 2019.

Quality Media is a performance marketing agency with a strong emphasis on influencers, creators, and performance creative. It’s home of Performance Publishing, which leverages the agency’s owned publication, The Quality Edit, helping to reshape how brands drive growth and build trust.

Both come back to a single question: “How do we acquire customers more efficiently through trust and credibility?”

Lauren is also deeply focused on AI’s role in PR. “Brands need PR more than ever. ChatGPT pulls in external references from sources like press, Reddit, TikTok. And that determines discoverability.”

For many clients, Dreamday is the bridge between brand storytelling, commercial performance, and modern search. Meanwhile, Quality Media redefines how they scale through paid social, performance publishing, and conversion-driven storytelling.

Dreamday’s Performance PR Model

Of everything Lauren has built, one of her proudest achievements is the success of Dreamday’s Performance PR model, an approach that redefined how modern brands measure and scale PR impact.

The foundation of this model was built when Lauren noticed how traditional PR treated storytelling and performance as separate worlds. This gave brands no visibility into which articles actually drove trust, revenue, or long-term authority.

Having felt the pain firsthand as a VP of Marketing, Lauren built Performance PR. It blends editorial craft, affiliate and conversion data, and transparent reporting. The result? A PR engine that is both creative and quantifiable and above all, effective. 

In 2025, Dreamday saw more than 30%+ YoY growth in both revenue and EBITDA. Their clients consistently earned 2–3x more earned media placements than with prior agencies, and the firm has been recognized by Adweek, Inc., Fast Company, and The Los Angeles Times.

Dreamday expanded to over 50 team members, and added 24 new clients with one of the lowest churn rates in the industry. Today, they represent category leaders including AG1, Quince, ILIA, The New York Times, Amazon, and Ruggable.

Advice and Takeaways

1) Build the thing you wish existed.

Lauren didn’t set out to start two agencies. She simply saw a gap no one was filling. PR wasn’t modernized, affiliate was stuck in the dark ages and credibility wasn’t treated as a performance lever. She recognized those issues and built a model that fixed them. 

Consider the pain points you experience over and over again. Instead of simply working around them, consider how you’d like to see them solved and how you can innovate. From there, you can test, start conversations within your network, and explore what’s possible.

2)  Treat trust like an acquisition channel.

Lauren believes the most efficient growth comes from channels rooted in credibility: press, creators, authoritative reviews, and trusted editorial. In her view, trust isn’t a “nice to have” layer on top of performance marketing. She’s seen firsthand how these sources act as accelerants across the entire funnel. 

Consider auditing where trust actually comes from within your category. Which voices do your customers genuinely listen to when making purchase decisions? How do those signals show up in search, social, and AI-driven discovery? Once you have those answers, consider how to bring those trusted sources into your marketing ecosystem.

3)  Brand and performance aren’t separate, they’re compounding forces.

Lauren’s agencies integrate press, narrative, creative, and analytics because consumers don’t experience brand and performance separately. A powerful story makes performance channels cheaper and more effective, while high-performing channels help reinforce and scale the brand narrative. When these functions operate in tandem, they create a flywheel that increases efficiency and strengthens brand equity over time.

Revisit your acquisition mix and consider where storytelling, authority, or third-party validation can make your performance channels more efficient. From landing pages to social ads to search, look at the points in your funnel where credibility might remove friction. Even small shifts toward trust-driven messaging can have an outsized impact on both conversion rates and long-term customer loyalty.

Think long-term: What could help make your campaigns more successful over time? The right agency partner. And Vendry can help you meet yours, for free. Get started.