Meet Rebecca Jerndahl Tepavac

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their career, insights, and accomplishments. This week, that leader is Rebecca Jerndahl Tepavac, Global Head of Brand at Klarna. 

Rebecca spent her career learning both the art and logistics of great storytelling—she went from working film sets to commercials to agency work to brand side.

Here are the need-to-knows about Rebecca:

• Rebecca was the lead on Volkswagen and Samsung during her time as Account Director at DDB Stockholm.

• She orchestrated Klarna’s global Snoop Dogg campaign, one of the company’s first fully integrated, multi-market brand activations.

• She led the recent brand refresh at Klarna that involved a new take on storytelling, art direction, and design.

Starting with storytelling 

After studying design and art direction at ad school in Stockholm, Rebecca unexpectedly landed in film production, working on feature films, music videos, and television. But a few years into that, she was ready to delve into her educational background in advertising.  

That led Rebecca to DDB’s in-house production company where she produced commercials for a stint. Eventually though, she switched over to DDB’s agency to work on accounts. 

“It was super helpful to work so deeply with storytelling from the beginning because I gained an understanding of what will make a difference for a story and the end result,” she said. “But I also learned about budgets, trade-offs, and how to prioritize where to spend money.”

Learning from launches

As an account director at DDB, Rebecca worked on major accounts like Samsung and Volkswagen. Samsung in particular proved to be a speedy education in client-advertising relationships.

"Samsung launches so many products across so many categories. Home appliances, mobile, audio — you name it," she recalled. "We had one team working on all of it so I learned a lot about balancing different requests and guiding clients on how to prioritize their plans.”

While Rebecca loved working on the agency side, she saw the limits of being an external partner and wanted to explore a role where she could have a more comprehensive influence on a brand. So when she was approached by Tele2, a major telecom provider in Sweden, she seized the opportunity. 

After about a year and a half with Tele2, the former CEO of DDB Stockholm—aka Rebecca’s former boss—came knocking with a new opportunity at Klarna. At the time, the buy now pay later brand had about 30 marketers and Rebecca joined a brand team of just four people (the organization at large had 2,000 employees).

Building Klarna’s brand

Rebecca’s once-small team at Klarna is now made up of six total teams, all focused on brand domain. She says the most important element to success has been collaboration with other parts of the organization. 

“I’d say that’s a really big part of my career right now: building up the organization and finding a sweet spot of how we should be organized.”

Klarna’s recent years have been marked by external pressures: media scrutiny, regulatory conversations around buy-now-pay-later, a potential IPO. To build a brand with all that noise around it, Rebecca leans on consistency and transparency. 

"The most difficult thing is to be a consistent brand while addressing very different challenges in very different markets. For example, in Germany, people are very concerned with safety and security, while in England, there’s concern about young people going into debt from buy now, pay later,” she said. 

“It’s a joint effort between our comms and brand teams in how we address these things as transparently as we can. People will always have opinions, so to me, it’s about having a positive, human, and relatable brand that always sticks to our core principle of transparency.”

Of course, Klarna also invested heavily into AI early on, including in creative production. The transition offered Rebecca a wealth of learning.

"In the beginning, I had a heart attack every day," she laughed. "But I’m very happy we pushed ourselves to be in the forefront because the AI we have now produces really high quality images.”

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A standout campaign

One of the first campaigns Rebecca did with Klarna was the now-famous collaboration with Snoop Dogg. And it had many layers to it. 

“It was my first real 360 campaign where it touched on awareness, consideration, conversion, co-marketing,” she recalled. “I think we managed to create a really strong PR story to the campaign by making Snoop a minority investor in Klarna. Looking back, I still think it holds good quality, even though it’s a few years old now.”

The campaign, entitled Get Smoooth, was designed to show how smooth payments could be with Klarna. Nearly every Klarna touchpoint was modified to align with it. But the real kicker? That entire campaign was managed by Rebecca and her four-person team (in partnership with an agency, of course). 

The initial inspiration came from Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” song when he sings the drawn out hook, “Snooop.” The idea was to swap that line out with “Smooth.” 

At the time, Klarna’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in a press release, “Teaming up with one of the smooothest persons alive, opens new doors to Klarna as we grow and develop as a company.”

Advice and takeaways

1) Build your skills (or your network)

To build a great brand, Rebecca believes in the importance of having good taste. “You don’t need to be a creative but you need to understand what makes people’s hearts tick.” And if that’s not your strong suit? Find someone you can trust who does have that.  

Look closely at your skill set and be honest about any gaps you see. From there, build a network (internal, external, or both) of people who can help you fill them. Offer up your own strengths to others and help one another flourish. 

2) Understand your team on a deep level. 

Rebecca’s production background gave her a strong appreciation for how small decisions ripple across timelines, budgets, and creative quality. She said she still uses her knowledge of production in her day-to-day decision making. 

Focus on having a high-level and eye-level view of your team’s work. Too much focus on one element can cause challenges so find a sweet spot where you follow your north star while also understanding the ripple effect of seemingly small decisions.

3) Be open to innovation.

Throughout Klarna’s AI experimentation, Rebecca and her team had to learn as they went. They stayed open to new ways of doing things and she ended up being glad that the company raced to the forefront of AI innovation. 

As you experiment with new technologies, be open to how it can impact your work habits and patterns. Lean on your guardrails and standards, and see what positive developments come from experimentation.

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