Finding the Empathy in Data with Ian Baer

Ian Baer: You know, the problem's not your brand. The problem's not your customer. The problem's not you personally. It's that marketing doesn't work the way it used to. People don't work the way they used to. They make faster decisions with less information than ever. Younger consumers are trained. To make decisions faster and with less information, by the way, they're doing this in the B2B world as well.

I've advised a number of B2B brands. Like if you're going to wait around for the person, who's going to say, yeah, I'll take a meeting with a sales rep. That's not how most decision makers under 35 or 40 have been trained. They're going to gather up as much information as they can, and they're going to make a decision on their own.

And if you don't make information accessible to people.

Chris Hill:  Welcome to We Built This Brand, the podcast where we talk to the creators and collaborators behind brands and provide you with practical insights that you can use in growing your own business. Today, we're talking with Ian Baer, Founder and CEO at Sooth, a marketing intelligence company that helps brands, agencies, and media companies dramatically improve their marketing performance.

Ian has over 35 years of experience in the industry, and in this episode, we really dive head first into his philosophy and talk about his perspective on the landscape of marketing and the importance of emotional connection and storytelling. Now, I always love wading into deeper conversational waters and definitely hope we can find some time to have Ian back for another conversation because this was just frankly a delight. It was a lot of fun to talk to him. For now, though, let's get our waders on and jump into this conversation with Ian Baer of Sooth.

Alrighty. Well, Ian Baer, welcome to the podcast.

Ian Baer: Thanks for having me on, Chris. I'm excited to be here.

Chris Hill: Yeah, excited to learn more from you today about your business and what you've built at Sooth and how you all help solve marketing challenges for businesses.

So, we'd just love to dive into it. I always like to talk about where you came from and where you got your start.

What led you to where you are today?

Ian Baer: You know, one of the things I will often explain, especially if I'm teaching at a university guest lecturing, is that I nobody ever &taught me how to do this marketing thing. I have never taken a marketing class in my life. I was a journalism major. So what I learned a lot about in college as a journalism major and a, a sociology and, and psych minor is I learned about the importance of storytelling, and I learned about the critical nature of human empathy, human understanding. Developed a real hunger early on to understand why people did the things they did, not just what they do, but why?

And when I got into marketing, and I found myself in a position pretty early on to influence marketing strategy while never having taken a marketing class, like I didn't know about the three P's or, you know, any of those things that supposedly unlocked all the keys to marketing success, what I knew was that if I understood somebody's motivations, I understood how they made choices, I understood what was important to them, independent of marketing, then I could find a way to help that brand relate to that human being. So from the earliest days. That's how I approached marketing, and over the years, I guess, while I knew I was really good at this marketing thing, I didn't realize that what I was doing for my clients, what I was teaching my teams to do, eventually what I was building agencies and building strategy and creative departments to do, was a definitively different practice that all had to do with empathetic storytelling and getting to the heart of how people make the decisions they make. Ultimately, when I decided to pivot out of the agency business, which was very, very good to me for 35 years, the mission really became about codifying this work that I had done, which had consistently delivered better results for all my clients. I mean, we're talking, you know, often between four and 10 times the marketing performance that came before.

I sought to codify that as a repeatable practice. In doing so, we actually, wound up with a patent pending methodology that decodes the emotional tendencies, the emotional decision making hierarchy, really for any population. And that defines the work we do at Sooth.

Chris Hill: That is really cool. I mean, taking the emotional aspect of things.

I mean, I think a lot of people do think more on the intellectual level of we've got all this data. We got all this information. Surely we can make good decisions based on the click through rates on this particular thing and not think through the emotions maybe behind that decision.

Ian Baer: Well, and I think also to an extent we have been

overly trained by a lot of the "powers that be" in marketing. When I hit "powers that be," I mostly mean like, you know, the digital media empires to believe that it's all about targeting in that moment of truth, and that if we just have all the right data to find someone in that precise moment, when they're ready to buy, we win. The unfortunate reality of that is if you wait until somebody's ready to buy, you've missed the greatest part of the opportunity, because all you're doing at that point is fulfilling an immediate need. Well, history tells us 95 percent of the time people will choose the brand that does the best job of meeting their needs in the moment. If you're a brand that has spent millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars on brand equity, building a great brand experience, building a killer mobile app, building an amazing, useful, friendly, engaging website. And in that moment, somebody is opportunistically there with something that sounds either a little better or simply more immediate than what you have to offer all that money that was spent on brand equity

goes up in smoke in that moment. And we see it happen all the time. Think about the last time you were scrolling through Facebook, and you saw some reel, some video for a supplement, a nutritional supplement that claimed to do something that previously only a pharmaceutical could do. Now, think about that drug company that might've spent a billion dollars bringing that drug to market.

But in the moment, here's something in a capsule. Here's something in a gummy that I can click on right now in Facebook. It says it's going to control my diabetes. They wouldn't lie to me, right? So all that R and D, all that brand equity, all that experience, all that data, poof. In the moment I bought that gummy 'cause it looked good on Facebook.

And this is the, the dilemma that brands find themselves in, which is one of the reasons the DMA says that over the last two years, marketing effectiveness has declined 62%. It's declined 71% over the last four years. I found myself, I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago with about 75 CMOs, and the topic that came up more often than not was how poorly everything was working in their marketing organizations.

And it sort of led me to this, this line that I found myself repeating over and over again, "It's not you, it's marketing." You know, the problem's not your brand, the problem's not your customer, the problem's not you personally. It's that marketing doesn't work the way it used to. People don't work the way they used to.

They make faster decisions with less information than ever. Younger consumers are trained to make decisions faster and with less information. By the way, they're doing this in the B2B world as well. You know, I've been, I've, I've advised a number of B2B brands. Like if you're going to wait around for the person, who's going to say, yeah, I'll take a meeting with a sales rep,

that's not how most decision makers under 35 or 40 have been trained. They're gonna gather up as much information as they can, and they're gonna make a decision on their own, and if you don't make information accessible to people you lose.

So much of the conversation we're having is if you wanna reclaim marketing effectiveness, you actually have to engage with somebody far earlier.

Then their moment of need. And that is counterintuitive to the way a lot of people have been taught modern marketing is supposed to work moments, moments, moments, moments. No, it's more of a long haul. And it's about emotional connection. And it's about empathy and it's about really understanding what somebody needs and finding a way to give it to them.

It is the oldest rule of selling. There is understand what somebody needs and find a way to give it to them.

Chris Hill: Identify the pain, push in on the pain. Like that's, that's what I was taught in sales all those years ago of like. You know, identify what that pain point is and bring everything back to how you're going to solve that pain and that problem.

And that's why those supplements and things sell like hotcakes because people are going, I'm in pain right now, scrolling through, you know, scrolling through TikTok.

Ian Baer: And because part of their pain is I don't want to go to a doctor. I don't want to deal with insurance. I don't want to get a prescription.

Wait a minute. I can get these gummies that are going to solve all my problems. Click, click. I'm in. And that's the challenge. About 10 years ago, only 40 percent of people regularly made impulse purchases. It's gone up every year since the latest data says 88 percent of us. Buy on impulse and we're spending twice as much on impulse as we were a few years ago.

We are more comfortable shelling out hundreds of dollars at a time for things that we didn't plan to buy. So it makes it really, really hard for a brand to get anything out of, out of all that equity it built up.

Chris Hill: Yeah. And it's, I mean, I'm, I'm thinking through a situation I was in recently where, I'm learning to fly fish this year.

That's just a personal, personal endeavor of mine. It is an adventure like no other. And I can't even imagine it's, it's really fun, but I was like, you know what? I was like, I'm going to start cheap. I'm not going to do what I see. A lot of guys do where they go out and they buy 16,000 worth of gear. They do it once and then they give up on it because it's so difficult and it's difficult.

So I started cheap. And I've been slowly adding, now, admittedly, I've done some research. I went into a fly fishing shop, Orvis, who, they have a local fly shop here. And, you know, I started trying stuff on. I found out that my sizing was weird. And all of a sudden people in the store going, well, you know, we only have this one option here and it's more expensive than what you want to pay, but we'll give you a discount and like all those things combined.

I just made that impulsive decision. I wasn't fully planning on it. My wife was a little surprised when I came home. But you know, it was one of those impulsive decisions that I made just on the emotion and also these guys gave me the warm fuzzies, right? Like, I have been into the store multiple times.

They know me. First time I came into the store, one of the guys played with my daughter so I could talk to another associate. And like, you know, I'm like, I like these guys. I like this environment. They're doing their best to help me out.

Ian Baer: I mean, it's such a great example, right? So what Orvis did was they connected with you emotionally before the moment you were ready to buy.

And very often that's what we talk about is emotional connection works because it creates a mutual sense of expectation. It helps the brand. Understand and expect what someone wants from them. What it also does is it trains that customer to expect as you did, Chris, when you were ready to really invest in fly fishing, there was some part of you that said, Orvis gets me.

I'm not going to start over with a Google search. I'm not going to follow a bunch of fly fishing influencers and social media and see what gear they recommend. Orvis gets me, those people get me, those people understood me not only as a, as somebody with an interest in fly fishing, but my needs as a dad, my needs as a customer, how I want to be treated, what a good give and take in exchange feels like, and that's exactly what we're trying to help more brands do, is anticipate what people need.

Because if you connect emotionally. With a customer or a prospect, you know what they need often before they know they need it. And when they do need it, that reciprocal expectation is already in place. That's why brands that emotionally connect with their customers are worth four times more. The, the value of emotional connection, I think one of the, the data points was somebody who feels emotionally connected to a brand.

Not only did they spend four times more, but they remain a customer an average of 20 months longer. So if you think about any recurring revenue business model, a subscription product, A prescription drug where, where the annual customer value could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just think about what an extra 20 months of customer life is worth.

Chris Hill: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, coming from a business that does just that, you know, recurring retainer based services, and I'm sure you're probably in a similar boat of like, if you save them money, if you do something to connect with them emotionally, maybe they go through a rough spot and they need to be spotted a month on their service or something like, yeah, we've gotten so much life out of clients because, you know, we've, we've catered to their emotions because we care, but also because that just helps continue to grow, you know, to build that trust.

So I see exactly what you're saying. That's, that's, that's great.

Ian Baer: Yeah. Everyone's really good at focusing on the what and when. I mentioned, you know, my journalistic training, everything for me always comes down to, you know, who, what, when, where, why, how, and marketers are tend to be much better at focusing on the what and when than on the who and why.

But if we invest a little bit in understanding who's buying, why they're buying, what their criteria really are, then you're not going to get chewed up by the buzzsaw of instinct and impulse that is really hurting a lot of brands.

Chris Hill: Well, we've dove in on the deep end of this and I love it. So I'm happy to keep going down this line, but I do want to know a little bit more about sooth itself.

So you said you were in marketing for 35 years, you've got into the business.

Ian Baer: I'm sort of a rarity too from the agency world. Not only that I survived 35 years of agency life, which in itself is, is. Remarkable for someone of my youth. I lived several lives in the agency world. I started as an account person, which was not what I sought out to do, but it's where my first agency put me.

I wanted to be a creative, I wanted to be a copywriter. They needed an account person. I needed a raise. I became an account person and then I grew up through the ranks of account management, went on to be president of a few agencies, but along the way. The thing that really kept me in the game all those years, which was strategy, when I was an account person, when I was an agency leader, making sure we got to the right, most effective ideas was always my mission.

Well, eventually, strategy became a specialty. It wasn't when I started in the late eighties. So then I pivoted out of account leadership and general agency management, focused my career on strategy leadership, had the opportunity to be chief strategy officer of a few agencies, and also spent seven years as a chief creative officer.

So by the time I pivoted out of the agency world, it's like I had my account leadership career. I had my strategy career. I had my creative career, did the agency president thing, definitely not the job for me. And, and, had such a well rounded set of experience that I wanted to be able to solve as many problems as I could for brands.

Outside the agency model, doing the things I do best, which is helping my clients get to superior insights, more impactful insights that drive better results. I saw way too many case studies from agencies where they were bragging about things like, you know, we increased this brand's email. Open rate by 8 percent and that's not why I'm here.

I'm, I'm really, my mission is to transform the relationships between brands and people who buy from them and make those relationships more empathetic and use data as the key to unlock that empathy. I feel like brands have so much data, so much technology, But we tend to use that data in the wrong ways.

And, and there is such a tendency to want to use data in ways that are awfully mercenary. And I get that. It's okay. I prefer to use it to solve people's problems.

Chris Hill: So you mentioned, you mentioned using data to be empathetic. How, how does a brand become empathetic with data? I can think of some ways that you might want to go about it just with the content you write or the content you create and how you communicate with people.

Is that a lot of what it is or is there something more to the secret sauce?

Ian Baer: There are certainly different degrees, but, but the secret sauce when it comes to Sooth and the reason, I never thought I'd wind up being an inventor and yet here I am, the reason we have a patent pending on our method is because we developed a set of algorithms that allow us to analyze lies.

third party data and specifically the signals and patterns in that data to decode the emotional decision making tendencies of consumers or business people. I read an article in 2016, I think it was actually published in 2015, and if you or your listeners have not read it, I couldn't recommend it more highly.

It's called The New Science of Customer Emotion. So, when Harvard Business Review did this study, working with, actually one of our data partners, Halixa, they determined, that of all the emotions we feel, there are only 10 that positively correlate to people's brand choices. They are things like the need to feel confident, or the need to have fun, or the need to feel connected to other people.

And of course they all have undersides too, right? So like if one of those key emotions, for example, is security. Well, the underside of that is fear. And we've certainly seen fear used in, you know, everything from marketing campaigns to political campaigns, very effectively, all of these emotions, you know, confidence has an, an underside of insecurity.

And, and certainly we've seen that used in a lot of advertising over the years. But we focus on, on these 10 emotions. So Harvard proved out that if somebody, if a brand emotionally connects to a customer, as I mentioned, that customer at the time was worth 52 percent more. And to me, as somebody who had always been preaching this opportunity to engage empathetically with, with customers and often found that greeted by.

Well, that sounds nice, but it's kind of a warm and fuzzy and I have to sell stuff. Suddenly, I had a white paper that I could share with my clients that showed, no, actually, this is a really good way to sell stuff. And I became almost obsessed with it. Well, in the eight years since that was first measured and studied, that 52 percent increment is now a 4x increment.

Because as the rest of marketing has gotten more commoditized, And more expensive, we've seen emotional connection emerge as the highest leverage opportunity brands have. So, going back to your question on how you use data to unlock empathy, data can be analyzed and used in ways that allow us to detect people's emotional needs from their decision making patterns.

The websites they choose, the stores they visit, the brands they trust, who they watch on TV, the mobile apps they use, and how they use them, and who they follow on social, and all of those data signals together paint an incredibly robust behavioral picture. Of of a buying audience. So that's always where we begin is with that behavioral analysis.

Then we can overlay onto their decision making tendencies and their behaviors, their media habits, their retail habits, their social media habits, and in the end, provide the brand with a very detailed dossier that almost functions like a user manual for how to sell anything to any audience.

Chris Hill: That's fascinating. So when you're talking about the pulling in the behavioral habits, is that surveys that go out to the audience? How is that working? Because we're attribution is also becoming a big challenge, which is why these emotional connections are a thing. So how does, how does that factor into this?

Ian Baer: So, we license data from a multitude of sources, everything from emoji analysis to text based analysis to social conversation, survey responses, digital behaviors, media behaviors, retail behaviors, as I mentioned, social influence patterns, and, and all of that gets crunched together with the magic of AI.

And what is remarkable is when you analyze what somebody has already done, you can crunch what would normally take a couple of years worth of custom research and in market testing into about a month's worth of analysis that can tell you before you spend your money. What's going to work and what's not going to work.

We can actually predict at a 95 percent confidence level, which media channels are going to overperform your ROI and by how much, which are going to underperform your ROI target. And by how much we knew, we had something going as we started to walk into clients and You know, present the insights that they hired us to find, and we would hear things like, Oh my gosh, where were you six months ago when we decided to sponsor this sports team?

You know, we had no idea that, that the audience that consumes more of our product than any other doesn't attend live sports. And you know, what it has really become because brands struggle so much with. Attribution with marketing mix modeling and really knowing where the money went. The best value we can provide is in helping people know in advance where to put their money, where to place their bets.

I've always felt that the best thing you could do for any marketing leader is answer the question. If I had a dollar, where should I put it to deliver the most to my business and be able to look at it in as diverse and expansive a way as possible. You know, it, should it be a shelf talker? Should it be a TV spot?

Should it be product placement? Should it be a contract with this social influencer? You gotta be able to look at those things apples to apples. It's unacceptable in 2024. If somebody says they can't, of course they can.

Chris Hill: Well, let me ask this then. So what are those trends that you're seeing in the present year over the past couple of years as the places where people are seeing the most investment for their money?

Ian Baer: It varies. You know, I think one of the most important trends that we are watching is the merging of the B2B and B2C. Marketing environments, it always used to be the B2B had its own rules and I touched on this a little bit before more and more. And I think it was McKinsey used the word consumerization.

Of business to business marketing, especially through the pandemic, where everyone found themselves think about, you know, where you might be sitting right now. As you listen to this, you're probably not in what I would call a single state environment, meaning purely at work, purely at home, purely on family time, purely, you know, on personal time.

We are simultaneously. Members of our family, we are professionals, we are hobbyists, we are connoisseurs, we are enthusiasts, we are activists. And those modes are simultaneous, they are not nearly as compartmentalized as they once were. I often think, I love the TV show Severance, which if you haven't seen it, it's so good, right?

I'm not sure Severance gets made today. I'm not sure that gets green lighted. Today, because the notion of being able to compartmentalize the person you are at work from the person you are in your home life, I think 10 years from now, be a completely foreign concept. So when people are very comfortable shifting.

Minute to minute between personal and professional, it really blurs the line in terms of what their expectations are for interacting with with business brands, the devices they use, the information they share. And this blurring of the line, I think is one of the most important trends because it actually now brings this notion of storytelling and emotional connection into the business world as well.

And it's certainly a very important thing, especially as Gen Z moves into the business world, starts to take over a little more business decision making every year and as social media natives. And as people who are used to doing everything in an independent, digital fashion, very different from the generations that came before, they're just not working the way all of us did.

And by the way, they also, a lot of them finished up college or, did a significant part of their college during the pandemic in some form of isolation. They're not as used to socializing ideas. As older generations are, they are used to independent information gathering and decision making. And that doesn't really fly with the consensus building more old fashioned sales process of B2B.

So that's just, I think, one example of where the trends are taking us.

Chris Hill: Well, that's, that's a good one. And that's, that's a really interesting one for me because I've always, most of my career has been in B2B stuff. So thinking in a B2B mindset, B2B marketing, B2B to business development, like it's all, all kind of under the same umbrella from my experience and what we've seen, I mean, what you're saying feels like it's really true because I've seen a lot of move towards.

What we call permissions based marketing, right? You opt in to get advertising. You opt in to get this information. You opt in even to accept cookies now, which has an impact on attribution and the things that are challenging right now, the challenge becomes when you're trying to do social media marketing, right?

Like if you're, if you're putting a lot of money into tick tock, it's like, is that money actually coming to us? You have to ask people now to get that information out there. So that becomes a challenge, but that permission based marketing. Makes sense that we would now be starting to see that merge because over time, people were like, I want you in my channels.

I want that information. You know, we all know, why am I blanking on the guy's name?

Ian Baer: Oh, Gary Vee.

Chris Hill: Gary Vee. Thank you. Yes, that's, that's how much I've tried to put him out of my head. I'll just say that.

No offense to Gary Vee. I'd love to have him, but

Ian Baer: boy, there, there is no more polarizing figure in the marketing world than Gary Veeaynerchuk.

Chris Hill: Yeah, but the, the, the challenge, the challenge is like, if you follow him on, like I've followed him on LinkedIn for a little while and all of a sudden he was creeping into my social feeds and I didn't want that information there.

Ian Baer: Yeah. Well he's become almost more of a self help guru.

Chris Hill: Oh yeah,

Ian Baer: then just a marketing guy at this point. I mean, he's, he is really the definition of personal brand,

Chris Hill: right? Which works for him. And for the people that want that, you know, want that content, like he's making himself available in the best ways possible.

It's incredibly effective until you were like, Oh, I was just curious about you on LinkedIn. I didn't want to see you on my Instagram feed too. So, so yeah, I can definitely see where that's, that's a big benefit

Ian Baer: and I didn't want to buy your merch.

Chris Hill: I mean, I like wine, but come on, man.

Ian Baer: Well, he's, he's certainly, you know, as, as really one of the early, I guess you'd say crossover artists from the world of digital marketing. You know, Gary, Gary's done some extraordinary things, but he's, he's branched out into things like, you know, they manage athletes now.

I'm, I'm just sticking to the world of marketing insight that, that makes me very happy.

Chris Hill: So, yeah, so I think permissions based is, you know, because to your point, like he has agencies, right? He's got that business side and that's why he's in all those different places because he knows at some point you might need to engage with his agency and he, he knows that that's part of his business development and part of his strategy.

So yeah. Cool. Yeah, you're seeing that more and more. We're seeing that in the podcasting world. A lot, you know, people want to come in and do B to B podcast because it's a way of getting in front of people, becoming them a mini Gary Vee or what have you. So,

Ian Baer: and content is, is the way to do it. We realized that very early on after we launched suit that, until you actually heard what we had to say, you weren't really going to be able to, to.

Understand why we're here. We're not a data company. We're not a research company. We're an insights company. You don't hear about a lot of insights companies. You don't hear a lot of CMOs say, you know what I need to do in 2025? I need to find a great insights company. But we think five years from now, they're going to be saying that.

So it's a matter for us of getting the thought leadership out there and hopefully, We've You know, connecting with people who might hear what we have to say in an interview on a podcast and say, okay, wait a minute, that's actually something I can use. I'm going to take that to work with me and put it into action and hopefully it's that's different from what I'm hearing every day.

I need more of that. So I think really those B2B marketers, so much of it is about owning space in thought leadership and it is just too easy for any brand, B2B or B2C, to be seen as a parody offering and then it's over. Then you're back down to that moment when somebody is desperately in need. So yeah, it, that everyone wants.

Content they can use the first rule for a brand now in any space really is be helpful. And when you're helpful, people pay attention to what you have to sell.

Chris Hill: Yeah, they definitely do. And yeah, I think, you know, a lot of how to's. I mean, and to that point, I mean, that's even where AI is going with search, right?

Like people will ask Google a question now as opposed to just writing a word because they know AI is going to answer it. And if your question isn't matched up with what Google has, you're missing out on search results.

Ian Baer: Very true. And, and one of the big challenges with AI of course, is that all the, all the raw material for AI.

Is human. So, you know, all the input, it had to come from a person that will bring with it biases that will bring with it exclusions. And, and that is why, you know, it's certainly AI in the hands of talented humans. Is where this is all pointed as opposed to the thing that keeps way too many people up at night, which is, you know, AI replacing us.

AI is going to push us to do more, do better, and it is going to raise the bar for people to contribute genuine talents. You know, when a machine can Iterate something 500 times over, well then that's not what we should have our talented people doing. Anytime somebody asks me about jobs going away in marketing and advertising because of AI my response is, I would spend less time worrying about that and more time figuring out how you're going to use AI to do the thing you do better, or to do something you can't do today.

And certainly with sooth, that's, that's what we did. If it wasn't for AI we couldn't offer what we offered. It would have taken years to reach the same conclusions we can reach after a couple of weeks.

Chris Hill: Yeah. So going back to sooth and how you grew it, like I always like to know in these interviews, like what was your first big moment of validation?

Because you, you leave. This industry of 35 years, you go off to do your own thing. I know how much of a challenge that can be. Did you have clients out the gate? Did you have to get some? And then what was that validation that, Hey, I might be onto something with what I'm doing beyond just the idea of my head.

Ian Baer: Took six weeks to land our first client, which was a pleasant surprise. I thought it was going to take longer than that. But, but even then, you know, and even now, to an extent, there's a challenge in helping brands understand the value of these insights, understand, how and why they would do things differently.

You know, if they knew more, I would say the ahas came pretty early on, especially when we would get in front of. Companies like Meta and Gartner, you know, not just brands, but, but, you know, when Gartner says this is the most inventive use of data we've seen in a very long time, that that's a little, it's, it's encouraging.

It's humbling. It's all those exciting things, but it let us know. And we continue to be validated by Okay. Look, I told you, I was at this conference a couple of weeks ago, a few of us were from Sooth, and there were 75 CMOs there. We were the only company exhibiting at this conference that does what we do, and, and we occupy a completely unique place.

There are research companies, we're not a research company. We're a, what should I do company. The marketing world needs more of those. So we're very validated by the feedback we get from clients saying things like this is more than we've ever known about our customers in the history of the company, but mostly the validation comes when they put our insights into action.

And see better results and as a company that's less than two years old, you know, we're still counting those successes as, as we grow and mature. But again, it's built off of decades of, of what we know and have proven works in everything from financial services to transportation to, to technology, you know, in the end, 90 percent of all the choices we make with our money are emotional.

We help brands understand what people need from them emotionally, and it's it's the most unique offering in the space, but we're making a difference.

Chris Hill: Well, Ian, that's really fascinating, and I'm glad it's going well for you. You know, being so early on in your company, and that could be a challenging time just to even know from week to week what's going to happen next and when the new clients going to come.

So getting validation from big businesses like. Always a, you know, a good sign. Things are going well. So that's great.

Ian Baer: Thank you. Yeah. It's and, and it, it, I'm sort of in that putting back phase of my career. Like I said, 35 years at the agency business now, two years with sooth. I do spend a good deal of time, talking to marketing students and, and, you know, lecturing on this because I do want to help people do this better.

And to me, that's the most emotionally fulfilling part of, of the work we're doing at Sooth is we're just equipping people to do a better job. I marketing's been great to me for decades and to see so many brands, so many agencies struggle with performance, I've never struggled with, with marketing performance.

And I want to be able to share more of, of those tools with. Brands and individuals who can use them.

Chris Hill: That's great. That's great.

So last question I always ask at the end of an episode, is what is your favorite brand right now? We've talked a lot about branding. We talked a lot about what you do and how they connect emotionally.

So I would imagine it's one that connects emotionally really well, but I'd just love to hear your insight on that.

Ian Baer: I really think T-Mobile does an exceptional job for a big brand. In a very commoditized industry and an industry that, you know, a lot of shoppers and consumers in the category love to hate their wireless company, but you don't find a lot of T-Mobile customers hate T-Mobile and what they managed to do.

But look, they can never solve all the problems you're going to have. Calls are still going to drop out. Data is going to slow down. Calls are going to freeze. Crap's But they have figured out how to take away the pain wherever they could. And they communicate it very well. The messaging, I love the work they're doing in TV right now, or at least a lot of it.

Because the messaging is so clear. You know, when I see, for example, Verizon has now relaunched as a, as a brand. And, you know, I gotta be honest. I'm not sure I know what they stand for today. I'm not sure I know what AT& T stands for today. I know exactly what T-Mobile stands for, which is saving people money on cool technology without a lot of commitments.

And when you can carve out a space, it's no wonder that they are cleaning the other brands clocks in their category. You know, they're not the only ones doing it well. I think some of the most entertaining advertising continues to come out of the insurance category. Which is kind of crazy. I mean, like 30 years ago, there was no competitive insurance advertising.

And now it is this fabulous shootout of these really richly developed characters. You know, I think a lot of the Liberty Mutual stuff is great. In the end, does it differentiate any of those brands? No, everyone's saying the same thing, which is, call us, we can probably save you money on car insurance. So, you know, when I see a brand that has really carved out A space that is solid emotionally, they know the value they can provide and they know what they, what they can't provide.

Yeah, I think, you know, they're not a client, but I wish they were. I think, I think Timo has done exceptionally well. I became a client of theirs because their advertising is so good.

Chris Hill: Yeah, I would say out of the telecom space and actually full disclosure, I used to work for AT& T on the corporate side. So I've, I've been there, I've done that.

Ian Baer: And I worked with Verizon for 12 years on the agency side.

Chris Hill: There you go. And we've done, we've done some little telecom projects here and there over the years, but like, yeah, I would say T-Mobile is doing a great job with their marketing. I mean, they've got two of my favorite actors, you know, doing those, You know, doing doing those commercials now with,

Ian Baer: the scrubs spots.

And now I think I read that that has actually led to interest in a scrubs reboot, and they've got, they've got the deals almost done. One of the streaming platforms is bringing back scrubs with Zach Braff and Donald Faso.

Chris Hill: Yeah. So, so good. Yeah. Yeah. Hope. Hopefully that goes well. Cause I really love the original series.

Ian Baer: From what I from what I've read, it's, it's very close and you know, I thought that Superbowl spot they did, two years ago at this point with Travolta. That was the best spot of that Super Bowl for me because again, it's, they're selling a highly commoditized product, you recognize their ads, you know what they stand for, and, and they resist the temptation to overly complicate anything.

They make it very easy for the people who should buy from them to see themselves in the advertising and to say yes.

Chris Hill: Yeah, they do. They do a great job. My in laws are, dedicated T-Mobile subscribers in part because too, they have a great international option. And my in laws lived overseas for 30 plus years, I believe.

So yeah, they, they appreciate that aspect of, you know, I think they're owned by Deutsch

Ian Baer: and fabulous small business service. Shout out to my, my T-Mobile team there. Very responsive and helpful and, and they seem to get the plight of small business people. So I love that.

Chris Hill: That's awesome. Well, very cool.

Well, Ian, thank you so much for your time today. Where can people find out more about you and connect with you?

Ian Baer: Find me on LinkedIn. Very, very accessible there. And I love to get to know folks and, and, I'm, I'm active in the space. Look us up at "soothbetold." So it's like, "truth be told," but you know, "sooth" means "truth."

S-O-O-T-H, soothbetold.com. Check out the work we're doing, shoot me a note at hello@soothbetold.com if, if you wanna chat more. And, I love talking shop. So thanks for that, Chris. And, and again, thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed this.

Chris Hill: Absolutely. I did too. Thank you so much.

Thanks for checking out this episode of We Built This Brand.

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