After a 30-year career in business, Professor Lauterborn was "seduced into academia" as the James L. Knight Chair Professor of Advertising at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a position made possible by a million-dollar grant from the Knight Foundation "to improve the teaching of advertising." Over the past dozen years, Professor Lauterborn has made speeches and/or run workshops and seminars in 19 countries on IMC, Internal Branding, Improving Creative Performance, Marketing and Marketing Communications Productivity and several other topics. In 1999, the Business Marketing Association presented him with the G. D. Crain, Jr. Award (named after the founder of Advertising Age) for "lifetime contributions to the development and improvement of business marketing," and inducted him into the Business Marketing Hall of Fame.

He is a co-author of the best-selling book Integrated Marketing Communication: Pulling It Together And Making It Work (NTC, 1993), which has been translated into five languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese), and a second book titled The New Marketing Paradigm. In a survey among American academics and agency and client-side practitioners, the IMC book was ranked 14th all-time among books influencing the study of advertising, and number one among books written since 1986.

Prior to joining academia, Professor Lauterborn was Director of Marketing Communication & Corporate Advertising for International Paper worldwide. He also spent 16 years with General Electric in marketing and corporate communications management. He is also a principal in Morgan Anderson Consulting, a marketing communications management consulting firm headquartered in New York, and a marketing advisory board member for Aprimo. Always active in the industry, he is a former vice chairman of the Association of National Advertisers and chairman of the Business Marketing Association. He has also been on the boards of several other industry organisations, such as the Advertising Research Foundation, and chaired the Business Advertising Research Council. He also consults for companies in a broad range of industries, some of which include IBM, AT&T, HP, Dow, Exxon Mobil, Texas Instruments, Progress Energy, Hyatt and GMAC, and for advertising, public relations and promotion agencies worldwide.