Esther Uhalte

Executive Director, Global Media, CRM & Loyalty

Estee Lauder

Esther Uhalte is Executive Director of Global Media, CRM and Loyalty for the Estee Lauder brand and is responsible for helping drive media strategy, effectiveness and efficiency in top markets around the world, in collaboration with the regional and local teams.  And she emphasizes, "My role is to help our local marketing teams make smarter media investments—again that’s smarter media investments, not necessarily more investments."

In many ways, Esther has the perfect international background for her global role. Born and raised in Pamplona, Spain, she has lived and worked in Spain, Germany, France, and the US. She's one of the few executives to have experience within media, agency and marketer roles. Esther holds a Bachelor's degree in Advertising and Public Relations from the University of Navarra, Spain; a Masters in Marketing from the Sorbonne Graduate Business School in Paris; and a Professional Certificate in Digital Marketing from NYU. Spanish may be her mother tongue, but she is also bilingual in German, French, and English, and for the last 15 years has consistently alternated reading a book in each of her four languages during her commute.

She explains that the Estee Lauder brand spans the luxury skincare, skincare, makeup and fragrance categories.  While this is a competitive advantage for the brand, it adds complexity to the media strategy when other brands tend to operate in just one or two categories— enabling their consumer messages to be more streamlined. Given their breadth of products, the Estee Lauder brand has more messages with greater variation to communicate, while it strategically allocates media resources by category.

Esther acknowledges that media for the beauty industry has been traditionally focused on raising awareness of new launches, elevating the brand profile and maintaining brand equity. "Today," she says, "these factors remain important, but media must now deliver so much more—especially prompting the consumer to action. As part of an important call-to-action strategy, media must support and link to our retailer channels, as well as our own e-commerce and m-commerce sites."