After spending three decades and most of his career in leadership roles at some of the world’s largest advertising agencies, Ian Baer founded AI-driven marketing insights agency Sooth in 2022.
The company’s premise – and the founding principle of its patent-pending technology – is that AI can quickly sort through reams of data to come up with insights that allow marketers to reach them more quickly and efficiently.
Baer also evangelizes that brands work to emotionally connect with their customers, always considering what they need to do to solve their customers’ problems.
Baer chatted with Spotlight about his unique perspective on how marketers should operate in 2025 and beyond in this week’s exclusive interview.
Spotlight: You spent most of your career working in leadership positions at major advertising holding companies. What led you to found Sooth?
Ian Baer: I graduated school with a really weird background for somebody who would then spend his life in marketing, because my whole educational background was in journalism and social sciences. I had this passion for understanding people's stories and being able to share them. I grew up wanting to be Jimmy Breslin. I wanted to be the newspaper columnist that everyone read every day to understand the perspective of others on the world so that they could form their own. When I shifted gears and somehow wound up in advertising, that passion was still there.
Now I'm sitting here talking to you, it's 37 years later, and I am still so overloaded with empathy for people to be understood and seen and heard. The more that I saw the changes happening in the marketing and advertising space, the more I saw it become about this commoditized fight to the magic moment where somebody is going to buy a watch or buy a car. And I saw that becoming increasingly less effective. I saw consumers going numb to that type of approach, consumers realizing that they have limitless choices, limitless options. They can buy whatever they want, whenever they want, through whatever channel they want, and for practically whatever price point they want. At that point, it really becomes much more about being able to understand and amplify somebody's individual story, to really understand how a brand can empathetically meet their needs, because any brand that's not doing that ultimately is not going to sell anything. Somebody's always going to do a better job of making somebody feel understood. My passion now is to help more brands connect with the heroism of understanding and solving for individual need.
I don't see enough marketers focus there, because they've got access to all the right technology, all the right data and they're using it all the wrong ways.
Again, I'll go back to my roots as a journalist, breaking it down to the who, what, when, where, why, how? Everyone in marketing is really good at everything but the who and the why. And yet, 90% of the choices people make with their money are emotional, and that's been proven. All most marketers care about is ‘what do I have to do to get them to buy?’ At the moment they're ready to buy, it's a big, commoditized shootout, and it's a matter of who's willing to pay a little more for that media impression, who's willing to make a more aggressive offer, who's willing to make a more outrageous, often false claim, or who's going to hook up with the right influencer. But the reality is it would be much more effective if the brand put the same investment – or actually a much smaller investment – into understanding the human being and [how to satisfy their need] before they got to the moment of that media shootout where you're up against 20 competitors and instead, you were the first brand to really make that customer feel seen and heard and understood.
You know what it's like with those brands that hold a special place in your heart. We all have brands where we are emotionally attached. There's a reason people spend eight times more with brands that they're emotionally attached to. In that case, it’s not an even playing field. I'm not going to buy on price because I've got an emotional attachment to this specific brand. Marketers can then anticipate what their customers want from them before they ever have to go into that shootout mode. That is why I'm still doing this, and that's the problem I'm trying to fix.
Spotlight: Sooth’s elevator pitch is that it uses bespoke AI to ‘pinpoint where marketers should and should not be to achieve maximum marketing efficiency.’ But you were just promoting brands’ emotional connection with consumers. How do these two things work together?
Baer: For all the years I've been working with brands, I have been the biggest fan of research and insights of honestly any agency person I know. A lot of agency folks don't really embrace research because it slows things down. Even for clients, it tends to be the first place that the red pen comes out when something has to get cut – we’re going to cut measurement, we're going to cut research, and we're going to cut understanding. That's a problem, because then you're just taking a chance on the marketplace.
As big a fan as I am of understanding, here's what I watched happen over my 35-year agency career: I watched research not getting funded, I watched measurement not getting funded or investments in both being on and off, depending on who was making decisions that day, or who needed to pull money for this or that. I also watched a lot of insights expire by the time they were made available to people. We would pay a consulting firm $2 million for this incredibly rich segmentation of our customer base that would be completed in 18 months. There’s a reason that Sooth’s data is refreshed weekly. Things change too quickly and in too many cases, I was watching clients invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in insights that could either never see their way into the marketplace or by the time they were implemented, were no longer valid, no longer had impact.
AI lets me access data and apply algorithms that help us relate behaviors to emotions. Based on the websites you interact with, the apps you use, the TV shows you watch, the influencers you follow, we are able to ping about 100,000 different data signals off of 220 million US adults, or a subset of them, for any given client and their business need, and immediately create a whole bunch of signals that allow us to establish, within weeks, a very clear, emotionally driven pattern of discovery, decision making, knowledge sharing, and all the things that go into consumerism. So now I can deliver for a client in about a month for a five-figure investment, what used to take two years, and half a million to $3 million and not be very useful. It's like magic. I feel like Professor X.
Spotlight: What data are you accessing to provide these insights to clients?
Baer: We license anonymized data from third-party aggregators and we are able to cross reference the multiple databases. We don't necessarily have every database for all 220 million people, but we are able to cross reference these databases to give us this very rich psychological and behavioral profile. We have our own set of algorithms that allow us to predict people's emotional priorities. So in the moment where somebody is choosing between the thing that makes them feel safe and the thing that looks like a good time, we can predict at a 95% confidence level which door they're going to pick, but then we can also see exactly the content and experiences they will seek out to satisfy their emotional needs. That is what makes it magical, because you very quickly go from looking at data to getting to know people, and you can do a lot more when you're getting to know who somebody is and how they operate as a human.
Spotlight: What AI are you incorporating?
Baer: It's a combination of this proprietary set of algorithms that we've got a patent pending on, which has to do with predicting the emotional hierarchy of needs of any business or consumer audience. We also license a very large number of AI-driven psychological and behavioral profiles from third parties. But our way of orchestrating it all together is quite unique, and it's what we call the Sooth method.
Spotlight: How terrified should I be by all of this? I’m kind of joking.
Baer: This isn't big data, it's good data. Our entire mission is that we work in service of the consumer on behalf of the brand. Our job is really to advocate what people genuinely want and need, not to force things on them.
At one time, advertising was very comfortable saying to a consumer, if you want to be cool, if you want to be socially accepted, if you want to be popular, if you want to look rich, if you want to look handsome, buy this product, people are much savvier than that today. They know that confidence doesn't come in a bottle or a tube or a box anymore. People are much more self aware, and they just want to solve their problems, and they just want to live their lives in a more positive way, and everything we do is to give brands the ability to act with empathy towards customers, because forcing things on them doesn't work. There's a reason emotionally connected marketing is so much more effective, and it's because it's the only thing that doesn't sound to the consumer like bullshit.
Spotlight: Give me an example of emotionally connected marketing.
Baer: There's so many. I always love when I see brands do it right the first time. I've been following this space very closely since around 2017-18 when I really got religion about the fact that if we're not seeking emotional connection, there's really no point to marketing, because nothing else works.
You know who I thought did an amazing job, and it's probably not a brand you hear brought up often as a hero of marketing, is Discover Card. Years back, when I was working with other clients in the financial service industry, I see Discover Card launch a commercial in which they're explaining that when you call Discover, you'll actually get a US-based English-speaking or Spanish-speaking, whatever language you need, customer service representative. No other company, not American Express, none of the top-of-the-food-chain brands could offer that. People said, ‘that's completely insane. Discover has the lowest credit score clientele in the business. Why would they do this for them?’
But I knew why, because I had been studying people in the category and what Discover had identified, which I already knew on behalf of another credit card client, was that getting their problems solved quickly was the number-one frustration of credit card holders. Right after they did the thing about the the phone reps, they did a campaign about the ability to freeze your card if you lost it, instead of having to make that horrific phone call when you wake up the day after night of partying and you can't find your card and you can't find your license and all that stuff. It's really hard to get a brand to get heroic about a feature or a benefit. Brands always want to tell you everything that's awesome about them every time they have the opportunity, but that one really jumped out to me.
I've also done a lot of work with Alaska Airlines, and the whole point of differentiation for us was making our communications all about what people do when they get to the destination, the memories they take from the destination. We didn't focus on the airline seat as much as we focused on what makes a frequent traveler to San Jose tick. And when you really can get into that, you're at a whole different level because we don't just get that you fly. We get why you fly, and we get what makes a good flight and a bad flight for you and that's really what we’re talking about when we talk about emotionally connected marketing.
I used to do this massive customer experience study when I was at my last agency, and consistently, what we would find was the brands that had the happiest, most satisfied, most loyal customers were the brands where the one trait they possessed above all other was their ability to solve problems.
Spotlight: Do you get the same result if you run creative that creates an emotional response in people even if it doesn’t actually solve anyone’s problems?
Baer: I think there's a difference between emotional resonance and emotional connection and here's an example. I'll never forget the way I felt after watching Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. It was the first time that I really came to understand the gravity of the climate crisis, and this oncoming train that we were all headed for. And I started talking to a lot of other people who saw the film. I found it very emotionally resonant. It affected me. It made me feel heavy, made me tear up a little bit, made me winsome, made me angry. It created emotions. Did I emotionally connect with it? No, because I didn't do these things that created this crisis so I walked away feeling pretty powerless in terms of what I could do about it. I came away kind of saying, well, game over. It sounds like that's the end of the world. There's nothing we could do about it.
I think that’s where a lot of people in this country are at right now. A lot of people are feeling that level of apathy, like I don't know what I can do to make the world better. Emotional resonance just makes you feel, and it makes you feel, in a very Spielbergian way, the things that the creators would like you to feel, if they're good at their job, emotional connection is based on what you already feel. Emotional connection is coming to you based on an understanding of who you are, where you're coming from, how you got here, the voices you hear in your head, the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning and meeting you there. To me, that's the difference between emotional resonance, which is more about creation, and to an extent, manipulation, versus emotional connection, which is about understanding and reflecting that understanding.
Spotlight: My audience is entertainment marketers. One thing I hear from people is that brands are jealous of entertainment marketers because their product already connections emotionally with people. What kinds of lessons do you think entertainment marketers can learn from this?
Baer: I get fandom, but that's still coming more from the top down, where a lot of what we're talking about and where I think lessons can be learned is in that bottom up. Really the entertainment industry, for the most part, starts by talking, starts by having an idea, starts by creating something and then finding an audience for it. But if you ask the audience what they wanted, you might land on a very different product. And I'm not talking about that old, choose your own adventure, kind of gimmicky way of doing it. But ’hey, mom of a five-year-old, if you got in front of the TV for one hour, what's the most impactful thing you could take away from that? Would it be parenting advice? Would it be an escape?’
I think audience-driven content, to an extent, reflects the future of where at least a part of entertainment has to head. We're seeing the shift from these traditional programmers to creators as we are seeing more eyeballs on a political podcast than we do on a news network, and we have to recognize something has changed. It’s more of an audience- driven, creator-led model. And I think that's an evolution we're going to have to see from the entertainment industry.
