SOOTH is an insights-driven company that tracks the habits of 200 million consumers and can accurately provide intel on the emotions that will make them buy or not buy your product with the help of proprietary algorithms and AI. Pulse 2.0 interviewed SOOTH founder Ian Baer to learn more about the company.
Ian Baer’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Baer said:
“Before launching Sooth in 2023, I spent 35 years in advertising, working for some of the best and most awarded agencies, including Publicis, Rapp, Deutsch, TBWA, and Rauxa, which I helped grow into the largest woman-owned agency in the US. My agency career was unique because I served as president of three agencies and chief strategy officer at three others. I also spent nearly a decade as a chief creative officer. I’ve won an array of major awards, from Effies to Addys to *Adweek’*s Presidents Award—for leading a fourfold increase in year-over-year growth at one shop. I’ve worked in nearly every consumer and B2B category with brands like Samsung, Chase, Verizon, American Express, Apple, Amazon, and dozens of others.”
“I often say the marketing industry is a ‘land of misfit toys’ because so few people you meet follow an ordered path to get where they are, unlike in other professions. Along those lines, I have never taken a class in marketing or advertising in my life. I majored in journalism and social sciences at Fordham, which lit a fire in me to pursue a career that would help me understand and tell stories aimed at ultimately helping people in their lives. I stumbled into advertising more to secure a job after graduation than anything else and was quickly promoted to account management, which always felt like a forced fit. Still, it allowed me to work with clients and help solve their problems by applying my knowledge of storytelling alongside principles of psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, behaviorism, and theology.”
“While a lot of marketers apply more formulaic approaches to get results, the work I’ve done has always started from a blank slate, beginning with a deep understanding of the emotional and practical problems faced by consumers or business decision-makers and then finding authentic means by which the brand could solve those problems. Years before concepts like customer centricity and emotional connection became marketing trends, I was helping clients tap into those ideas. I rose through the ranks and ultimately became an agency president based on my ability to build successful, profitable relationships with exceptional results. During this time, strategy emerged as a specialty in the agency space, and I shifted my focus to that area full-time about 20 years ago. Along the way, I served as chief creative officer at one agency for seven years. Regardless of my title, I always viewed myself as playing the same role for brands: helping them achieve extraordinary outcomes by truly understanding what their customers need and how to deliver it.”
Formation Of SOOTH
How did the idea for the company come together? Baer shared:
“When I left Publicis in 2022, after 35 years in the agency business, I wanted to expand my opportunities for impact in ways I couldn’t do from within an agency model. At this point, the concept of legacy also became vital to me, especially as I realized that my client results weren’t just good—they were exceptional. I saw campaigns from other agencies win awards for improving brand performance by 10%, while many of my case studies drove gains from 5x to 10x. While I helped major brands like Verizon and Audi achieve their best results ever, global marketing effectiveness was in steep decline. I had spent 12 years at my last agency, blissfully unaware of the growing marketing performance crisis.”
“While most brands struggled and failed to meet historical norms, my teams helped clients set progressively higher performance standards year after year. I deconstructed my casework and found a common element in all my most successful case studies: emotional connection. In each instance, it was the discovery of an emotional truth about a brand’s target audience that enabled these remarkable results. In 2015, Harvard Business Review published a study that proved ten emotional elements correlate with positive brand behavior. People who feel emotionally connected to a brand spend more, remain more loyal, and advocate for the brand. Since then, as overall marketing performance has declined, the value of emotional connection has grown more than sevenfold.”
“I created a set of unique algorithms that align people’s behavioral and psychological footprints in media and commerce with these ten emotions, such as the desire to feel a sense of belonging or safety. This is the foundation of the Sooth Method, which now has a United States patent pending. At the heart of the method is how we use artificial intelligence to crunch two years’ worth of predictive data and insights in just a few weeks. Our insights are derived by instantly referencing data on 220 million US adults against more than 100,000 behaviors and tendencies, aligned with each brand’s specific industry and audience requirements. Sooth could not have existed before the advent of AI, enabling us to do things with data that no one has ever done.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Baer reflected:
“Nearly every time we have presented our insights and findings to clients, there has been at least one instance where a client exclaims, “I wish we would have known this a year ago,” or something to that effect. We quickly began to see that our work helps brands focus their resources on messaging and media that our data tells us will work before spending time and money on unnecessary research and testing. I’m the biggest fan of research and testing, but most clients don’t have the budget or organizational patience to spend months or years learning what will work. And often, by the time you gather insights through those traditional methods, they’re no longer valid or actionable. So, when a client says, “Now we know what we need to do,” it’s incredibly validating and satisfying.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Baer explained:
“Everything we do is built on a foundation of emotional understanding and a prioritization of emotional needs based on the Sooth Method. We have developed a portfolio of analyses and tools that make this understanding immediately actionable so clients can begin making better decisions and putting our insights into action within weeks of working with us. In all my years in marketing, I have never been able to give clients so much valuable insight with such efficiency. The key to marketing effectiveness is more often knowing where not to spend your money so that plans and budgets can be focused on the most impactful content, media, and experiences. That’s the value we bring to our clients.”
Evolution Of SOOTH
How has your business evolved since its inception? Baer noted:
“In our earliest client work, we often identified opportunities to offer brands more than they requested in terms of insights and analysis. For example, while analyzing various social media platforms for a financial service client, we discovered that we could cross-reference additional data sets that gave our findings more context and made them more accessible to act upon. This revealed precisely what actions people took on each platform and how frequently they used them.”
“It’s great for a brand to know that its customers are on Instagram but not on TikTok; it is far more valuable to understand that they are on Instagram several times a day because they prioritize it for fashion shopping. Therefore, we evolved our offering for that client and every subsequent client. We have now invested in that same level of precise behavioral data for every available mobile app. Consumer behavior and data consistently help us redefine what is possible for brands. For example, since we have penetration and affinity data on most national and regional brands, we can give a client an analysis that serves as a proxy for brand awareness, usage, and share of requirement for about 10% of the cost of a traditional brand tracking study. We can deliver it fast and refresh the data as often as the client wants because our databases are updated weekly. We constantly evolve and look for new ways to help clients make the best decisions for their brands and customers.”
Helping Various Types Of Companies
What types of companies can Sooth help? Baer emphasized:
“When we launched, we envisioned focusing on consumer brands, as we use first-party consumer data for our work instead of tapping into business databases. However, we quickly learned that our model allows us to work with B2B or even B2B2C brands, as each of the 220 million people in our database has professional data markers, including title, vertical, company size, affiliations, media usage, technology usage, and more. The same emotional priorities govern the decisions we make for our family, business, and personal pursuits. If your tendency is to make choices that satisfy your need for safety, it will play out across all these areas. Since we view everyone through the same set of lenses, we can uniquely juxtapose business and consumer audiences for a brand in ways that are nearly impossible otherwise. When considering a complex model like pharmaceuticals, we see a patient, caregiver, primary care provider, specialist, and pharmacist individually and collaboratively throughout the entire brand journey.”
“Although much of our work involves partnering directly with brand marketing teams, we also support brands through agencies and media companies. The strength of our model lies in producing fully customized work for the unique audiences we create in collaboration with the brand and agency teams. Different inputs result in different outputs, and the ways each client utilizes our work varies – from powering better briefs to informing media plans and even feeding our insights into programmatic media buying models to accelerate performance efficiency.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Baer affirmed:
“We help brands leverage media and messaging efficiencies that they wouldn’t otherwise find. There is no business or consumer category we can’t assist, and nobody delivers as much insight about the people who buy from your brand – or the competition – as we can in about a month. We don’t compete with traditional research or data companies because our method allows us to generate more insights at greater scale and a fraction of the cost of these alternatives. If you want to understand who buys in your category and why – customers, prospects, and competitors – no other company provides such precise information in the same amount of time or at the same cost. That’s why we have a patent pending. Nobody quite does what we do.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Baer concluded:
“We will continue to evolve by listening to our clients’ needs and as access to data and technology allows us to explore new directions. Expanding beyond the U.S. is a near-term consideration, as our method of working with anonymized data holds even more value outside the U.S. market, where data privacy laws are more stringent. We will develop or integrate technologies that allow brands to target individuals based on our audience data—essentially turning our anonymized findings back into personally identifiable information (PII) that brands can activate. We also plan to develop AI-based tools that map our data to precise, vertical buyer journeys—such as travel, healthcare, or automotive. Our mission is to help every brand market more effectively by using data to unlock customer empathy, and we are just getting started.”
