A family name can get you into a conversation. It cannot sort 580 research papers. In 2010, while still a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy, Chase Lane took on that less glamorous assignment at the Naval Postgraduate School. He reviewed seven years of acquisition research, assembled a database, and proposed ways to manage the program more efficiently. Before the advertising career, before the corner-office title, there was an enormous pile of other people’s work to make sense of.
The project earned him the social sciences division’s Thomas D. Moore Award for summer research in 2011. His supervisor judged the work comparable to a master’s thesis, completed in one-eighth the time. That is a useful opening detail for a future agency chief: a young person confronted with institutional complexity who chose to organize it. Advertising would eventually give him more colorful material. The problem of making work intelligible was already there.
Lane became CEO of Phoenix-based LT in 2025, the third generation of his family to lead the agency. His grandfather Ed founded the business in 1962; his father Beau helped carry it forward. Chase had grown up around advertising, but his route back included military procurement, graduate school, teaching, consulting, and corporate strategy. Home was familiar. The professional perspective he brought home had been acquired elsewhere.
There is an easy version of this story in which a surname does all the work. His résumé makes that version rather inconvenient. The more interesting question is what an agency gains when its next family leader has spent years studying decisions in organizations that have little to do with an advertising pitch. Lane’s career offers a way to follow that question without pretending a marketing meeting is a military mission.
research papers reviewed as a cadet.
Seven years of institutional knowledge, organized.
The classroom before the conference room
Lane graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in management. He earned his Notre Dame MBA in 2015, then returned to the Academy to teach. A 2016 academic biography identifies him as a captain and management instructor, with work centered on marketing strategy and the study of teaching and learning. His education had become something he was responsible for passing on.
That year, he co-authored an article about applying appreciative inquiry in a military setting. The subject was how organizational structure and bureaucracy affect attempts to bring about change. Appreciative inquiry examines strengths as a starting point for organizational development. In this context, the initials AI referred to a method of inquiry, long before they would dominate conversations about advertising software. Even the acronyms on his résumé have had second careers.
He also appeared on a 2016 conference presentation examining the distance between effective learning techniques and the techniques faculty and students actually knew and used. The distinction matters: having good information somewhere inside an institution does not mean people act on it. A classroom can contain excellent research and still have students who have never learned how to put it to work.
Teaching places a particular demand on expertise. You must turn what you know into something another person can use. A diagram that makes perfect sense to its author may need another explanation, another example, or a simpler question. That is a useful lens through which to read Lane’s later responsibilities. His work has repeatedly involved the space between an organization’s accumulated knowledge and its ability to do something with it.
A return with several detours
At Kearney, Lane worked with Fortune 500 companies, government organizations, and nonprofits. He subsequently held an executive role in higher education, then worked in corporate operations and strategy at Light & Wonder, the gaming company and casino supplier. Those roles gave him experience on the organizational side of sectors that an agency might serve. The client’s world was part of his working life before leading the agency became his job.
LT’s leadership transition was announced on March 11, 2025. Chris Johnson, the outgoing CEO, moved to a board co-chairman role alongside Beau Lane. Chase took responsibility for the agency’s direction and daily leadership, while its earlier leaders continued to provide counsel. The transition also placed the growth of sister company Convince & Convert within his remit. His brief extended beyond one familiar name above a door.
Chase and his wife Kelsi became partners in the business that year. In his public announcement, he thanked colleagues as well as family, including Kim Johnson, who continued as COO and executive vice president of finance, and Donna, who was retiring after decades of work. It was a telling way to describe a handover: ownership mattered, and so did the people whose contribution could not be condensed into a family tree.
The agency itself had already changed shape. E.B. Lane and Terralever combined in 2013, bringing an advertising heritage together with digital capabilities. By the time Chase arrived, the inherited business was already the product of an earlier reinvention. A family company can carry a long history without being a preserved specimen. LT’s history gave its new chief examples of change as well as reasons for continuity.
What belongs on the wall - and in the work
In 2026, Lane described the responsibility of joining a business built over generations. The weight is easy to imagine without inventing a scene around it. Every decision about an established family business has more than one audience: the people working there now, the clients relying on it, and the history attached to the name. A new leader has to make decisions in the present while living with that company.
His first year included a renewed focus on LT’s values and strategic planning. He introduced weekly agency-wide conversations about values and linked decisions to shared priorities. The agency’s vocabulary includes integrity, unity, craftsmanship, speed with purpose, boldness, and humble confidence. The interesting part is the weekly conversation. A list can be printed once; discussing how it applies to actual work requires another appointment in everyone’s calendar.
That approach has a practical implication for an agency. Creative, media, accounts, and finance all see a decision from different angles. Shared priorities give them something to refer to when those views collide. They do not eliminate disagreement. They make it possible to disagree about a decision with a clearer understanding of what the business is trying to accomplish.
By June 2026, LT reported eighteen new clients and double-digit growth in revenue and margin during Lane’s first year. Those are company results, produced by a team. They also give the succession story a concrete measure beyond the announcement photograph. The handover had moved into the harder phase in which clients, colleagues, and financial outcomes start answering back.
“There’s a weight that comes with stepping into something that’s built over generations.”Chase Lane · 2026
The engine needs room for ideas
One of the clearest illustrations comes from paid media. Campaigns for businesses with many locations contain a deceptively ordinary burden: a changed image or link has to reach the right ads in the right places. The creative decision may take seconds to state. The execution can occupy people for days. A good idea still needs a reliable route from someone’s desk to a customer’s screen.
LT’s adoption of Fluency put that operational question into focus. In the agency’s reported experience, some multi-location creative refreshes that had taken forty hours could be completed in fifteen to twenty minutes. The software partnership began in July 2025. By August 2026, LT described using automation for campaign setup, launches, pacing, monitoring, and reporting, with rules shaped by the agency’s own strategy.
For a homebuilder, the benefit can be as specific as switching an advertisement from coming soon to now selling when a community is ready. That is a small change in wording with an actual consequence for the person looking at it. The operational machinery matters because an advertisement should describe the world as it currently stands. A beautifully designed announcement arriving late still arrives late.
Lane’s account of the investment concentrates on what it made possible elsewhere in the business. “The creative is the fuel of the engine,” he said in a video interview. With paid media able to accommodate more work, the agency hired three creative team members in one quarter. He described the resulting freedom to make longer-term resource decisions. Technology had entered the story through an operational problem; the consequence was more room for creative work.
One refresh. A different clock.
A name carried forward, a job done together
By 2026, Lane was discussing the operating model with an industry audience through a 4As session alongside Fluency’s Heather Chevalley. He was also listed on a casino-marketing panel with leaders from Potawatomi Casino Hotel, Tesuque Casino, and Eagle Mountain Casino. The conversations connect the parts of his career: operations, technology, and the business realities of clients. The family agency is the setting in which those experiences now meet.
His stated ambitions at the appointment were to develop LT’s services and expand its presence in Arizona and nationally. That is a direction, with work still attached to it. A national presence cannot be established by writing the word national into a presentation. It requires people who can sell the work, deliver it, maintain relationships, and make the next assignment better informed than the last.
The cadet database and the modern agency are separated by years and very different stakes. Yet both raise an organizational question: how do you make knowledge useful to the people doing the work? In one case, the material was hundreds of acquisition papers. In another, it is agency strategy, client requirements, and the details of campaigns. Reading Lane’s career through that question gives the family succession a more specific shape.
He comes home carrying an education in institutions, alongside a name with decades of local history. The history creates expectations. The education gives him tools. What happens next depends on how he and his colleagues use both. An agency sells ideas, but it also has to arrange the everyday conditions in which people can think, decide, and finish the work. That is where Chase Lane’s version of the family business is taking form.