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The Creative Is the Targeting: Sarah Lamine on Performance Branding, One Source of Truth and Scaling COD

Twelve years in performance marketing, an agency, a SaaS product and one conviction: the more sophisticated the technology gets, the more human marketing has to become. Sarah Lamine, Co-Founder & CEO of Convergen and builder of LiveMetrics, on the creative becoming the targeting, why brands need one source of truth, and how to scale cash-on-delivery without losing the economics.

Interview by @Nat · ABC Boarding Pass

Sarah Lamine has been working in performance since 2014, and she has watched the rules reset every two or three years. iOS 14 broke traditional tracking. CAPI, new attribution tools and SaaS filled the gap. Now AI is rewriting the job again.

Her answer to each reset has been the same: follow the real business number, not the platform's version of it. That idea built Convergen, an international performance branding agency, and LiveMetrics, the analytics platform that connects marketing spend to revenue that actually lands. In this ABC Boarding Pass interview, she explains how the two businesses feed each other and what she would tell any brand trying to grow in 2026.

From software engineering to Convergen

ABC: Take us back to the start. What got you into digital marketing and business strategy, and how did that turn into founding Convergen?

Sarah: To be honest, I never dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur. I didn't even really know what entrepreneurship meant at the time.

I studied software engineering partly because it was the trend and, honestly, because my father wanted me to. At the same time, I pursued a Master's in Digital Economy and Digital Marketing. That combination put me right at the intersection of technology, data and marketing, what we now call MarTech.

During an internship at a marketing agency, I discovered media buying and became obsessed with it. Back then, tracking wasn't plug-and-play. You had to understand how the pixel connected to a website, how platforms captured purchase intent, how data moved between systems and how all of that translated into business results. That's where my engineering brain and my marketing brain really connected.

As I grew in the industry, I felt there was a gap in the local market. Digital was often treated like traditional media on a new channel: create content, buy media, report results. But the real power of digital was in the data: measuring, learning, optimizing and connecting marketing directly to business growth. I wanted to build an agency around that idea, and that's how Convergen was born.

Building that model in Tunisia naturally opened the door to international markets, where brands were already more mature digitally and looking for this kind of performance-driven approach. Public speaking and building my personal brand then helped us reach even more clients internationally.

So entrepreneurship wasn't really the plan. I followed a problem I wanted to solve, and the company came with it.

Twelve years of resets

ABC: What's the single biggest shift you've seen in performance branding since you started?

Sarah: I've been working in performance since 2014, so that makes it 12 years now. I'm officially old in this industry. And that's what makes this world so mind-blowing: every two or three years, everything you thought you knew gets challenged.

iOS 14 was a huge one. We lost a big part of traditional tracking, then adapted with CAPI, new attribution tools and SaaS solutions. Now even SaaS is becoming AI-driven. Imagine being a SaaS founder today: I had to rethink parts of my own product before it even went to market.

And now we're living through an even bigger shift with AI. We used to manually build audiences, target interests, create retargeting segments and run different campaigns for every stage of the funnel. Today, algorithms are taking over more and more of that technical work.

The creative is becoming the targeting. Your hook, message, angle and format increasingly help determine who your ad reaches. So our job is changing too: less manual targeting, more creativity, psychology and understanding people.

After 12 years, that's the funny part: the more sophisticated the technology becomes, the more human marketing needs to be.

LiveMetrics and the question “which number can I trust?”

ABC: You built LiveMetrics, a SaaS platform giving cash-on-delivery brands real analytics on revenue performance. What problem were you solving that nobody else was?

Sarah: LiveMetrics started with a very simple frustration: which number can I trust?

After iOS 14, attribution became messy. Google would claim a sale, Meta would claim the same sale, and when you added everything up, the “tracked revenue” could be higher than the revenue actually sitting in the client's backend.

As we scaled more brands, the problem became much bigger. With COD, an order isn't revenue until it's actually delivered and paid for. With brick-and-mortar brands, a customer might cancel an online order and buy the same product in-store, so what looks like lost digital revenue may actually be revenue transferred offline.

We realized brands didn't need another dashboard. They needed one source of truth connecting marketing spend to real business revenue.

That's what LiveMetrics became: one place connecting Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, delivery data and offline revenue, so we can see the real performance of the business and make faster budget decisions. Now we're taking it one step further with Live Advisor. Instead of just showing you the data, AI talks to you about your own data, benchmarks it against your industry and helps you understand what to do next.

ABC: Walk us through how it works. What does a brand see that it couldn't see before?

Sarah: The simplest way to explain it: LiveMetrics gives brands one source of truth for their marketing and business performance. Instead of jumping between Meta, Google, TikTok, the e-commerce backend, delivery data or offline sales, and getting a different version of the truth from each, it brings everything together.

A brand can see its real revenue, real ROAS, acquisition costs and progress toward its business targets across all active channels.

But visibility alone isn't enough. The real value is helping teams make decisions faster. If performance changes during the month, LiveMetrics helps you understand where the budget should move and what needs attention, instead of waiting for an end-of-month report. With Live Advisor, we're moving from dashboards to intelligence: you can talk to your data, compare your performance with relevant benchmarks and get insights on what to do next.

It's not about giving brands more data. They already have enough data. It's about turning fragmented data into decisions.

What performance branding means day to day

ABC: Convergen calls itself an international performance branding agency dedicated to growth. What does that actually mean for a client?

Sarah: For me, performance branding is when you stop selling services and start taking responsibility for growth.

A traditional agency sells a deliverable: content, community management, media buying, SEO. You execute the service and optimize it. As a growth partner, we start with a different question: what does this business actually need to grow?

The answer is different at every stage. A new brand might need a conversion ecosystem, the right landing pages, tracking and its first profitable acquisition model. A mature brand might need better retention, a bigger basket, stronger profitability or expansion into new markets.

So day to day, we're not just asking “Are the campaigns performing?” We're asking “Are we growing the business sustainably, and if not, what is stopping us?” That can take us far beyond advertising. For some clients, we're involved in the business plan itself, helping define targets, marketing investment and where the next growth opportunity should come from.

Marketing is the tool, but sustainable growth is the job. That is our business model.

Two companies, one loop

ABC: You wear two hats, agency founder at Convergen and SaaS founder at LiveMetrics. How do the two businesses feed each other?

Sarah: Constantly. Convergen is the field, and LiveMetrics is the technology we build from what we learn in the field.

At the agency, we deal with real brands, real budgets and real growth problems every day. When we see the same problem happening again and again across different clients, we ask: can we solve this with technology instead of solving it manually every time? That's how many of the ideas behind LiveMetrics evolved.

It works the other way too. LiveMetrics makes Convergen better: it gives our teams and clients one view of performance, reduces manual reporting and helps us make faster, more data-driven decisions about budgets and growth. With AI, the relationship gets even more interesting, because we can turn years of agency experience and data into intelligence that helps brands decide better.

I don't see them as two separate businesses. One gives us the problems to solve, and the other helps us build scalable solutions to them.

Hot take: is cash-on-delivery dying?

ABC: Is COD still a viable model for scaling brands in 2026, or is it fading out in most markets?

Sarah: COD isn't dying. Bad COD execution should be.

In many markets, cash on delivery is still essential for two simple reasons: banking penetration and trust. Some customers don't have easy access to digital payments, while others simply want to see or receive the product before they pay.

The real problem isn't COD. It's how brands manage it. Too many brands think their responsibility ends when the order is handed to the delivery company. But the customer didn't buy from the delivery company; they bought from your brand. The experience is yours from the ad to the doorstep.

From a performance perspective, you need to track that entire journey too. An order placed is not revenue. You need the real delivery data, the real collected revenue and, ultimately, the real ROAS. COD can absolutely scale, but you have to own and measure the full journey.

Scaling too fast

ABC: What's the biggest mistake you see DTC and COD brands make when they try to scale too fast?

Sarah: Thinking that scaling revenue only means scaling marketing.

What works at 100K in revenue won't necessarily work at 2 million. As you scale, the entire business needs the capacity to absorb that growth: your team, processes, customer service, logistics and technical infrastructure.

A website that handles 1,000 visitors perfectly can crash with 100,000. Campaigns that are easy to manage on a small budget become much more complex at scale. A team that can handle 20 clients can't suddenly handle 200 with the exact same processes. And while you're scaling, the market isn't standing still: costs change, customer expectations evolve and new competitors appear.

Scaling fast is great. The real challenge is scaling your capacity to absorb growth at the same speed as your revenue. Otherwise, at some point, growth starts creating its own problems.

Localize the journey, not just the campaign

ABC: What changes when you take a brand into a new market?

Sarah: The biggest difference is always consumer behavior. You can't scale a brand in a new market by simply translating what worked somewhere else. Purchasing power, culture, trust, payment habits and even the perceived risk of a purchase can completely change the equation.

Take Tunisia. For high-ticket products like home appliances, a COD order worth 2,000 or 3,000 TND carries a very different risk: you can ship it across the country and still have the customer refuse it at the door. With impulse purchases, cancellation behavior becomes an important part of the economics too.

Every market has its own friction points, so before scaling, you need to understand how people actually buy, not just how they click. That's also why branding matters so much in performance. Stronger trust, better customer engagement and a great after-sales experience directly improve the economics of acquisition and retention.

You don't just localize the campaign. You localize the entire customer journey.

What comes next

Sarah: We're unlocking a new market right now with new partners, but I can't reveal too much yet. What I can say is that it's a very exciting next step for Convergen Group, and it brings together everything we've been building around performance, technology, AI and international growth.

The full reveal is coming on my next stage, so you'll have to follow me for that one.

> “Technology keeps changing. People don't. Talk to your customers, understand them, combine their insights with data, and you'll always find a way to grow.” — Sarah Lamine

Key takeaways

• The creative is the new targeting. As algorithms take over audience building, the hook, angle and format decide who your ad reaches.

• Trust one number. Platform-attributed revenue overlaps; the business needs one source of truth tied to revenue that is delivered and paid.

• Sell growth, not services. Performance branding starts from what the business needs to grow, not from a list of deliverables.

• COD scales when you own the whole journey. An order placed is not revenue; track delivery, collected cash and real ROAS.

• Scale capacity with revenue. Team, processes, logistics and infrastructure have to grow at the same speed as sales.

• Localize the customer journey. New markets differ in trust, payment habits and purchase risk, not just in language.

Want more operator interviews like this one? Explore the Affiliate Business Club blog.