Why 90% of Your Brain Ignores Ads

Mission: For today's buyers, that next purchase is never more than a tap away. A moment of curiosity at lunch, a nudge at midnight, an impulse on the train ride home. Attentive helps brands show up in all of those moments with the right message on the right channel at exactly the right time. And when every message feels that relevant, it doesn't just feel better, it performs better. That's what marketing made personal feels like. That's attentive. To learn more, visit attentive.com 90% of

Pranav Yadav: all of your memories are actually subconscious.

Mission: 90%. Wow.

Pranav Yadav: When someone asks a question, you need to have an answer. Regardless of you knowing the answer or not. You have to articulate your thoughts and seem intelligent. Recall is essentially our, uh, conscious recollection of that idea. When 90% is subconscious. So what brands have thought for years that they're measuring as memory by measuring recall that has nothing to do with real in market behavior. But you see, once you map the brain, then you can begin to connect the mind to computers. Because the subconscious mind has memories that have not been fully integrated.

Mission: Experts warn that tomorrow's battlefield could be

Pranav Yadav: the human mind itself.

Mission: Marketers have spent decades chasing attention, engagement and emotion. And today's guest has spent a career proving that these are all proxies for the one thing that actually drives action, which is memory. Pranav Yadav, uh, is the founder and CEO of NeuroInsight, a company that us map the brains of hundreds, uh, of thousands of people to measure what advertising actually does to people.

Pranav Yadav: I think there is no better way to destroy society than to create hyper personalization. What happens when you actually create hyper personal content? You and I are about to take different memories from the same experience. If that is true, even when you're experiencing the same thing, imagine a world where there is no common thing to experience. There's nothing for us to relate to and the only reason why we survive, human connection.

Mission: Pranav, welcome to Marketing Trends.

Pranav Yadav: My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Mission: Yeah. I'm so happy we made this happen. It's been months. I've been yearning for the conversation, thinking of all the juicy tidbits that we are walking through in our call. And to wait this long was like, man, this is a challenge.

Pranav Yadav: There's a Urdu couplet that says, uh, That with such intensity I have desired for this moment to have happened. That every atom in the universe has conspired to make this moment. So we've done it. We're here. Let's go.

Mission: I like that man. What a phenomenal way to start this interview. I love it. So you have shared that marketing has been leaning on pseudoscience for decades. Just giving it new names each time. I want to know what you mean by that.

Pranav Yadav: Well, I mean, great first question. You know, before we get into that, we have to define what marketing is and what it needs to do, right?

Mission: Let's do it.

Pranav Yadav: And if. If marketing is nothing but the art of controlling how you're remembered by the people who matter, like, that's all it is, right? I mean, we can get it different frameworks, right people, right time, right message. But essentially, the people who matter to you need to remember a few things about you that make them act a certain way with or without you being in the room. That is marketing. What have we. What have we measured or, or you know about marketing so far is from the time of, you know, first mass media. In terms of newspapers, we looked at the number of, you know, newspapers thrown every day into people's houses. When we got to tv, we started measuring with number of households with tv. Then we got a little more sophisticated, we got better measurement. We got Nielsen putting boxes in people's homes. We got the Internet. Now we're like, oh, number of views, clicks, etc. But are any of these things a good understanding of how someone received my message? Or did they understand the story, the way in which I meant to actually tell the story? What do they actually remember about me? We have no indication of that. We keep coming up with new things. You know, we spoke about the most recent fad being attention. Attention is the cost of entry into a conversation sometimes. But that's all it is, right? It is not why you stay. It's the cost of entry. Uh, it is what you need to earn to enter into a conversation. But what stays is memory. So the pseudosciences we rely on are things like that give us things to talk about in those rooms, or eye tracking gives me attention. Or I can see exactly where people dropped off in my video. Do you know why? Are you going to be able to change that to make it better next time? So, yeah, we've relied on the lowest hanging fruits this entire time. And I feel that truly understanding what makes people people, what makes people convert, what makes people behave the way in which they do, takes work. And I think we're unwilling to put in that work to understand our people. Gosh, we don't even put in that work to understand ourselves. So I don't fully blame the marketers, but I do partially, you know, blame them because it is their Job.

Mission: Yes. Okay. So attention is one. I'm also thinking just themes that I've heard on the show, like getting into emotions. I had an author that was big on, you got to get into the emotional journey, engagement, you know, and then clicks and all of the things that you just mentioned. So when I'm thinking about memory, like, walk me through that, because I know this is your whole world. So tell me, like, why is attention just the gateway, and why is memory more important, actually? Because I think that'll help show a lot of marketers maybe an opposite of what they're doing.

Pranav Yadav: Who are we? Why do we act the way we do? We are nothing but essentially a composite of the memories that we choose to actually save and where those memories are in their journey within our brains today. Right. We are a sum total of conscious and subconscious experiences that we've chosen to define us. We don't necessarily accumulate emotion. We do when emotion becomes memory. But, for example, in this moment, you may like me or you may dislike me, and that's emotion in the moment. But whether or not you may choose to actually bring this conversation up tomorrow, day after, a month later, a year later, that is memory. So if marketing were all about how you were feeling in the moment, and there is an experiential part of marketing, but actually, these guys are not measuring the experiential part of marketing with emotion. They are measuring the part of marketing that needs to stay with you for a long time, using emotion, which is the exact wrong tool to measure it with. So, of course, you know, attention is the, uh, is the cost of entry. You need to actually get someone to observe what's happening. Emotion is titillation in the moment. It is entertainment in that moment. To feel like, oh, are you engaging me in a variety of ways? You could engage me in, you know, just through sheer personal relevance and no emotion, uh, you could engage me through emotion. And if I think in this moment that what we've just experienced together, whether through visual delight, emotion, or personal relevance, is this something important enough for me to commit the most important resource in my brain, which is memory, to. Because that is what I will do in the future. So memory, and in all of marketing, you know, traditionally, now a little less so because you can actually have the entire funnel collapse and you can discover somebody and act on it in that very moment. It can happen. But even that has been subconsciously building for a long time. People actually begin to, you know, to mistake the flattening of the traditional funnel as something that's happening in that moment, it is still something that's brewing in you for a long time, and it is the memory that leads to that conversion in the future. People didn't invest in car ads so that someone could go buy a car. Right now you spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising for cars because a year from now, when you have the means and the need for a car so that this memory pops up in your head, so you actually go visit the dealership. So memory is, is the only thing we need for marketing to work, and we basically keep throwing everything at the wall to distract ourselves so we can sell more things internally within the ad tech ecosystem, while the efficacy of marketing not having improved by the slightest bit from the 1930s or 40s to about now.

Mission: What's the difference between recall and memory? Because, uh, many marketers, I think, are probably using these two terms interchangeably. Interchangeably.

Pranav Yadav: Why, why are you wearing the shirt that you're wearing today?

Mission: I like blue.

Pranav Yadav: Okay. Beautiful, right? Do you think that's the real answer?

Mission: I mean, it's probably like, oh, I'm going to be on camera. I'm on a podcast. Blue probably looks good on the camera. There's no patterns on it. You know, it's probably for that if I kept going.

Pranav Yadav: How many, how many times have you worn this shirt before?

Mission: Twice.

Pranav Yadav: Okay. And were.

Mission: I just bought it recently, so I

Pranav Yadav: mean, more to come. Yeah, it looks very nice. Were those pleasurable times in when you wore it, like, did it make you feel good or did something nice happen in those days?

Mission: Yeah. Good memories actually associated with this? Sure. Yes.

Pranav Yadav: So recall is your conscious verbalization of why you did something. It comes with a bunch of filters. One is the premise that 90% of all of your memories are actually subconscious. And let's define the subconscious. 90%. And let's define the subconscious because it's not some woo woo word. The subconscious is sub below your conscious awareness. So let's just let that sink in for a second, that first of all, you are nothing but your memories and 90% of all of your memories you actually consciously do not have access to. So recall is the things that you say because you've been trained in this society and you have been told that when someone asks a question, you need to have an answer. So regardless of you knowing the answer or not or the real answer, you have to articulate your thoughts and seem intelligent. You're on a podcast, for God's sake. Um, and recall is essentially our conscious recollection of that idea when 90% is subconscious. So what brands have Thought for years that they're measuring as memory. By measuring recall is literally someone watching an ad and you asking them do you remember what brand it was for? Now let me show you this. Cue the aided recall and see if you can actually remember the tagline and the brand. That has nothing to do with real in market behavior. There's a 24% correlation between people's stated behavior, recall and in market behavior. So if a trillion dollars are spent on new product innovation, marketing strategy, advertising In a year, 750 billion of those dollars are being wasted because we are measuring metrics like recall that in a boardroom can sound like you are measuring memory which defines behaviors even though they don't define it to be that way. And it's an absolute mess. And if anybody has any doubts about it, right. The most sophisticated form of surveying and measuring recall is political polling. And in the last America, couple American elections or Brexit, in a 50, 50% chance of two very well known entities. You know, when we surveyed people or you know, asked in their polls what they would do, we got an answer that was exactly opposite of what happened in the market. So now these brands, my question to them is do you think when that technology can fail there for two very well known entities you'll show five new ideas to somebody and be able to gauge which one they'll pick in market because that's what they're betting their entire futures on. That's the difference between recall and memory.

Mission: Wow. Okay man, so many questions. So if I'm, I mean now anyone in business, this is like also outside of marketing, but anyone thinking about how do I get my messages into that 90% like what does that look like? How do you go about thinking about crafting messaging that does that and then how do you think about tracking that which I know is like your whole company so we can dive into that too. But yeah, maybe the first one's like what does that look like to get it implanted in that 90%.

Pranav Yadav: Yeah, well you can't control what gets implanted in the 90 versus 10. You can control what gets implanted in memory, period. Right. Which way the brain chooses to consciously or subconsciously store it, you can't really tell. But the, the human brain is a ah, pattern seeking storytelling device. It does not know anything but a story. Everything has to be composed in that format for you to be able to absorb it. So every brand it's think about it like you're on one side of, you know, the, the ocean and you need to get to the Other side of the ocean, which is your destination of implanting yourself in someone's memories. Uh, the boat that takes you there is a story, right? And the stronger the boat, the more the chances you have to get to the other side. What makes the boat strong? The boat needs to understand the medium that it's traveling in. Okay. The medium that we're traveling in is the human medium. What makes the brain open the doorway to memory? What makes the brain open the doorway to memory is personal relevance. Right? It has the highest correlation to memory encoding. It needs to actually appeal to a, uh, truth that I know, whether consciously or subconsciously. If it can. The symphony becomes. If you can actually engage emotions along the way as well. Because it gives me more chances for me to then use this combination of personal relevance and emotional engagement to then be like, this is important. Let me store it into memory. Right? So, as in the arc of you telling the story, the brain thinks the story is valid. It's relevant to me. It has emotional engagement. Let me create memory. Now, your task is not to just be present somewhere in that story. To be present in that moment of memory creation. And that is the true craft of storytelling. Right? I just, you know, I told you, I just got married and I, uh, was in India, you know, an ancient civilization. The rituals with which we got married are, um, you know, probably 5,000, 6,000 years old. The stories that are told are, you know, as old sometimes. And how is it that while writing was only invented in, say, 800 BC plus minus 100, 100 years, these are oral traditions and rituals that were transferred from generation to another, you know, then written down verbatim. And this is not like a thin book, right? These are the four gigantic Vedas and the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. How is it that till today, like, uh, you know, last year or the year before, I was invited to ring the bell at Nasdaq for Diwali? How is it. How is it that a few thousand years later, that story is still resonating and, uh, you know, with the world in a way that. That happens. That happens because the story had a remarkable structure. There was a multi generational saga talking about human emotions, greed, you know, alignment with Dharma, being torn by what pulls you versus what you have to do to live in this society. For the greatest warrior in the world to land up in the battlefield only to be scared and wonder, why am I even fighting this battle only for God himself or the oneness Itself to show up and be like, well, let me tell you what life is about at that moment of peak memory creation where the answer is about to come. The revelation actually happens. Right. The Bible does a similarly phenomenal job. And any other remarkable. I mean, not to relegate any of these things to just being stories. Any remarkable story does that. It knows the arc that it's on when memories are being created and what needs to be revealed in what moment to continue engagement and for continue for you to fall back on that story over and over again. And that is the craft of storytelling, marketing, memory creation, and branding, for that matter. If they failed, if they told a remarkable story and created memories in various moments, but the key fact or what they wanted out of people came at a different moment and was not memorable, it would just be an interesting story, but not repeated over time or followed. And that's the answer is in ancient wisdom, like many other things, we've done it, we've known how it's done. Uh, we just do not put in enough effort to actually find out what is truly people's truth that will allow us entryway into the doorway of memory that creates all action.

Mission: This is interesting because I was just at an event with this shirt on where the whole event was all around the Berber culture and how they bring all these storytellers from all around the world and how their civilization survived through storytelling. Not through being the best when it came to war or anything else. It was just the stories that they passed along of how to survive. And it really had me thinking, after this event, I mean, we did the whole thing drawing the things on our faces, each one had a meaning and stories around it. And like, I was in it with them, like, really learning about this. And then afterwards, I just keep seeing in my life, next thing you know, I'm at a Passover dinner, which first time I've ever been to one. Everything stories, like reading, like, really understanding the culture and why we do, why they do what they do. And so it's. It's cool that this is like, circling me in so many ways. But I'm wondering if this is so obvious of looking at, like, to me, it seems obvious. I hear you talking, I'm like, yes, of course. Okay. People are passing along stories. It sticks in memory and we're able to keep them going. Why aren't brands. I mean, you have big companies as your clients, so I guess some are doing this. But what is the hold up here? And why aren't more people following this framework?

Pranav Yadav: Yeah, I think I think so. First, to your point, culture, which is also an overused word, completely under defined. If you were to actually ask every single person who comes onto your podcast starting today, what is culture? I'd love to hear those answers, because people use this word a lot, but they don't understand what it is. Culture is built on mythology, stories, songs, rituals, collectively over time, and it evolves over time, and then it becomes. Because it defines our experiences in life, it then becomes our window into how we perceive things.

Mission: For today's buyers, that next purchase is never more than a tap away. A moment of curiosity at lunch, a nudge at midnight, an impulse on the train ride home. Attentive helps brands show up in all of those moments with the right message on the right channel at exactly the right time. And when every message feels that relevant, it doesn't just feel better, it performs better. That's what marketing made personal feels like. That's attentive. To learn more, visit attentive. Com.

Pranav Yadav: The cultural difference is two people having heard different stories and different myths. You know, I love telling the story of when Alexander, in his last, you know, conquest, got to India, and he, you know, is adorned in this fantastic attire. Ah, he's on this horse, and he sees what he describes as the gymnosophist, the naked wise man in Greek.

Mission: Right?

Pranav Yadav: Uh, who's sitting under the tree, you know, looking up into the sky. And so Alexander and his massive army stops. And Alexander says, oi. So this guy opens his eyes or, you know, looks at this guy. He's like, yeah, what's up? I mean, these were not exactly their

Mission: words, but, yeah, what up, dude?

Pranav Yadav: Yeah. And Alexander goes like, what the hell are you doing? And the gymnast office goes, well, I'm the naked wise man, and I'm observing nothingness. What the hell are you doing? He was like, well, I'm Alexander the Great and I'm trying to conquer the world. And they both laughed at each other because they both thought that the other party could have not been more stupid. Uh, and the reason why they thought the other party could not be more stupid is because Alexander's myths were about greatness. You know, in Greek mythology, if you, you were great, you got to Elysium, you celebrated people like Achilles despite their heel. Like, if you set your foot in any battle, you won. And you look down on dudes like Sisyphus, who's trying to do the same thing over and over again and with no real result, only for the rock to roll back every day. That's the Greek myth. You achieve greatness in this lifetime. Korea, because there is one. But that's not the myth the gymnosophist heard. The Jimna surface came from a culture where life is infinite and you don't really seek greatness in that way. Because he'd heard stories of King Bharat who had wanted to climb the highest mountain peak in the world and hoist his flag there, only to get there and find out that there were a hundred other flags from a different time to realize the pointlessness of material conquest. So in Vedic mythology, there's also a river that you cross after you die, but you don't cross it once. You keep going back and forth till you get the freaking point of life. And so two different myths, two different end results on what you end up doing. Maybe in another podcast we can cover how completely without you realizing, these things show up in everything that we do. Every single thing. I was sitting down with a chef friend the other day and I'd once written a paper on how food is served in the west versus the east is essentially coming from this psychological framework that is different between the two sides. One where life is finite, time is linear. At the end, there is a balance sheet, net profit, heaven, net loss, hell. The other one where life is infinite, time is cyclical. There is no end and therefore no balance sheet. And the relationship in the first between you and divinity is that of master and servant, the relationship between you and divinity. And the other one is that you are divinity. You're just finding your way back to yourself. And that changes everything. That composition changes how you act in business. That composition changes how you serve your meals, how you live your life, what your relationships are like, everything, right? That is the myth or the story that changes your behavior. And if that thousand of year old ago, uh, myth can change those behaviors, imagine what myths in everyday culture does to us when America comes out. And like we are Americans, we do things this way. What that does to a population, how they change behavior, how they are likely to perceive, what they're likely to buy. That unless you understand that you're not even close to being a marketer, you can master the tools. You can hire a media agency that'll get very sophisticated in targeting. You can use AI, creative generation to tell stories. But to be effective, you know when you've looked someone in the eye and seen a change in them, to feel like, you got me, you look through my soul and there's an unheard truth within me that you discovered. And by the way, it doesn't need to Be some crazy shit, right? Think about this. MasterCard. One of my favorite examples to use, realize that the core human truth was that money is not everything. And yet MasterCard is a company that essentially makes money because of transactions. Those could not be farther apart. One needs you to get more transactions. But the truth you've just found out is that money is not everything. How do you bring the two together? How do I get. I know people only listen to me if I speak their truth, but my truth sits in the opposite corner. Comes the most iconic campaign of all time. You know, me going down on a sunny day in Soho, buying a coffee, $5, meeting someone interesting, striking up a conversation that lends into lunch another $45. Creating a friendship for a lifetime. Priceless. There are some things money can't buy, but for everything else, there's MasterCard. It maintains the truth of the human on the other side, while you integrating yourself and in the role that you want to play in that truth. And that is marketing. If that was a long way of

Mission: talking about, I love every moment of it.

Pranav Yadav: Storytelling, memories, and how to make effective truth come to fruition for your brand.

Mission: Uh, that was, I mean, one. I'm like, we should have a whole podcast going through ancient mythology and how it's influencing today. I think that would just be fascinating, going through these stories that just so easily come to you that most actually don't know. So, one, what's the best way to start learning that in a way that, like, you can apply it to your work? Because it's one thing to dive into mythology, but I actually haven't heard it connected in the way that you're doing in a. You know, you're bridging marketing, branding business with ancient mythology and stories. And so if I were like, okay, how do I learn that? What do you suggest?

Pranav Yadav: See, I think the, uh, I think if you have to learn about it, I think in the west, the people who thought about it in the, in the way that, that resonates most deeply with me would be Joseph Campbell, you know, and, and, and Carl Jung. Those two kind of viewpoints, you know, coming together would allow you within your frameworks. Right, Because I do come from a different framework. I mean, I've spent more than half my life in the States and all of my adult life in the States. But the, uh, the foundations were laid elsewhere. So I, I'm constantly bridging that gap in my need to make sense of the world as I get to experience it, which is a challenge every day. Um, I've had To figure out this for myself. And I think the reason to answer the question that went unanswered last time, why do brands not do this? Because it's hard.

Mission: Well, what parts are hard? Because I've heard brands say, okay, let's structure a hero's journey. I mean, at this point, we've produced like 3,000 episodes at my company. And so we have thought about that since day one. So I'm like. But I also think you can get caught up in that Hero's Journey trying to fit all the pieces. And especially if you're trying to make an ad like you lost real quick.

Pranav Yadav: Yeah. Which is why my recommendation is not look at Hero's Journey or anything. Point is, get to the essence of it. Hero's Journey M the reason why it appeared in the world is not because, you know, someone from Greece came to India. Someone, uh, from India went to Korea. Some of that may be true, that all of these myths are connected because there was some common root to them. That may be one explanation. But the other explanation is that everywhere you went, there were certain human truths that were undeniable. And what stood out to people was the undeniable, unsaid human truths that resonated deeply, that became the stories of that land or region. And what we need to do is the work to understand culture and people and stories and the unsaid truth that is the work. The work is not replicating a template from m the past, which is exactly where we fail. So the work is in. In giving yourself the framework, like my, you know, the tagline for my company, make your subconscious conscious is an ode to Carl Jung who said, make your unconscious conscious because it inspired us to do it our way and our version of it. So the companies don't do it because it's hard to be able to constantly invest in finding out what is the cultural truth in an honest and rigorous manner and stay true to the idea of that story leading to change. Because very quickly, if that doesn't work for six months, the question is, I'm not getting any return on the dollar. And unless you come with a leader who has the belief that that is the only way to sustain this, that me changing that behavior is actually going to be make, generate some short term revenue and satisfy the questions I'm getting otherwise, but actually is not in the of the long term gain of this brand. By the way, same thing for this country, right? Like it's the exact same debate for the brand of America. It is a marketing exercise. America, huh? Learned this a long Time ago, America produced more content. Talking about America and what it is to be here. The hero's journey within America, the art of the possible. Everything being possible, there being no limits, there being. These are the stories that America told the world in the past 100 something years. And we infiltrated places that nobody could imagine. This became the language of culture in places where there was a void. And yet we are backtracking on that story. And it's fine if it's a strategic move. It does have short term gains and that's the perfect example. But what it is doing long term is a different story to the brand. Uh, I'm not trying to make a political statement. That's, that's a brand problem, that's a marketing problem. And they are doing exactly what some of our biggest institutions are doing. Otherwise when it comes to their marketing, they're maximizing short term return and their stock price, which they owe to their, their shareholders. So I don't blame anybody for the long term gain, but I feel if we could create the culture, a society where an understanding of where we're going as people becomes central, where we understand that we are no longer in the era of kings and queens who control culture. We are the makers of story out there. So we can either make stories to titillate and try to get action today and actually encourage more bad behavior, or we can tell greater stories that will inspire an entire population to be a certain way. That could be marketing. That totally could be marketing. And there has been marketing like that. Some of the greatest marketing has been just that. If we could change that point of view, then we could be the civilization that gave more than what it took. But right now we're certainly maximizing and actually borrowing from the future just to maximize our indulgence today.

Mission: I agree. So, okay, I wanna back up a little bit to think through if the creating the arc of a story, especially for a brand or a company, the first thing is maybe to identify the unsaid truth, the truth that resonates with, you know, the group you're going after. What questions do you ask? Let's just say your clients, what do you ask them to start unraveling to get to these truths? That to me it feels like that's like the first hard point to tackle. But like, how do you go about that?

Pranav Yadav: Beautiful. So, I mean, so I think maybe, maybe the right time to introduce what my company does. We invented a, uh, brain mapping technology which came out of ADHD research to look at which parts of the brain light up as you experience anything and knowing which part of the brain does what, we correlated back to different physiological measures such as personal relevance, emotional intensity, visual attention, and most importantly, long term memory. And if I have to summarize my company in one sentence, we're the largest measures of memory in the world. So that's what we do. Now, a story is different from the truth, right? First, the idea is to identify the core truth. So if you've looked at a segment of women who are not different from any women in the past in terms of wanting to feel beautiful, but actually do not like the idea of, you know, cameras, makeup, you know, paintbrushing being the way that they want to be perceived, then you have to actually figure out what is the truth of that audience. So we would bring that group of people in, show them a variety of things, a variety of things that could be possible. And this is an imagination game. Stick electrodes on their heads and figure out where personal relevance, emotion, and most importantly, memory lights up. And you basically realize that actually beauty is an identity play.

Mission: Um,

Pranav Yadav: but even though it is in the eye of the beholder, the beholder can be changed a certain way for m me to feel a certain way. I don't even need to cater to a beholder who doesn't appreciate the beauty. I want to see beauty. So that's now, say a truth. Okay. I'm being very wary of not giving away any confidential information. So if that is now the truth you've identified, then the storytelling frameworks in the world, I mean, we have one, but the world, uh, has many others. So first is the category story. Like, what is the category that you want to play in? Do you want to say that I help you achieve more things? I help you solve a basic need? I help you become a version of yourself that doesn't happen in the future. There's only six or seven kind of category stories. Then there is the role that you want to play. Are you the hero of the story? Are you the enabler? Are you, ah, an observer? And commenting on how life is, you could pick these roles, right? And then there's creative distinctiveness that could come in hundreds of forms. So first is the identification of what is the core truth. Okay, women who see beauty a certain way, and this is their truth. Then if we are the brand, let's pick where we sit. Are we solving a basic need? Are we helping them achieve more stuff? The role that we want to play? How do we want to be seen? Uh, and then let's figure out creative distinctiveness. And then we tell the story right like you. You can take the. The example of Allbirds in their positioning and, you know, rest in peace with everything that has happened, uh, at the Brand versus Nike, when they first came out to position themselves, the role they wanted to play in people's lives. Those are choices that are made later about how you want to tell the story. But the core truth of the story they identified earlier. And they may not have done it in that process. It may have been some genius where this was inherent in their way of storytelling. But the way to do this is identify core truth, look at the storytelling framework, pick the role that you want to play and the category you want to play in, and then tell the story on top of that. So that's how I guide people through. Through that work.

Mission: Okay, and then how about the, uh, like CTA at the end? What does that piece look like? To wrap it up and beautiful.

Pranav Yadav: So. So as people. And I mean, we can do it naturally or through technology. Through technology. As you're observing a story, I can actually figure out the exact moments where you're actually creating memory.

Mission: So the CT through the electrodes on the brain lighting up. Okay.

Pranav Yadav: Yep. Do you want me to bring the electrodes to you to show your audience?

Mission: Yes, come to Austin. Bring it over next time. And I want to put it on my head and see, but yes, bring it this time too. Yeah. Okay. So those. So for anyone who's just listening and not looking, it looks like kind, uh, of like a little hat with a bunch of electrodes on it that you put on.

Pranav Yadav: Exactly.

Mission: Okay. And they're lighting up like those little circles. The white things are the cut. Like it'll light up in colors in certain areas as you're asking questions to them.

Pranav Yadav: We're not asking any questions. People are just going through an experience. They're watching something, and we're basically. So as neurons fire, that's how the brain communicates. Some reminiscence of that activity shows up in your scalp, and we can actually read that electrical activity and knowing where you got it from, you know, deep down inside what functionality that part of the brain actually plays. And knowing the geolocation of that activity then helps you correlate. Like, oh, I just saw something in the lateral prefrontal cortex, which means that people are encoding memory to that. And so you basically, it's set to a stimulus on a second by second basis that changed. And I saw this change in brain activity. And therefore I conclude that that is what led to memory or things like that.

Mission: So are all of those nodes all tied to memory or only certain ones. Are tied to memory. Only certain ones. And if. Which ones? On that head, on the lateral prefrontal cortex.

Pranav Yadav: So, so is where, like front, where you have the prefrontal cortex, you basically get like or dislike. It's an approach or withdrawal response. So. So that's my lean in or lean back response. Back of the head is where you actually have the emotional intensity. So all of these, you know, electrodes are strategically placed to actually look at certain kinds of activity. There are 20 electrodes in there.

Mission: Got it. Okay. And then do you switch up the messaging in different ways to see how it's firing? Okay, exactly.

Pranav Yadav: That's the. That's the only way for you to essentially, you know, find your way and navigate into enough variables to figure out what's driving what.

Mission: Yeah. And do you want it to go off in a certain way where it's like, boom, versus the prefrontal cortex, and then it goes here and then here and then bam. It's in the subconscious.

Pranav Yadav: That is the magic of being human. You can if that's. I mean, and that's kind of brand architecture, by the way. Right. All priceless ads were kind of made the same way. Right. So they had a formula, and they trained people to absorb that formula, uh, while keeping the newness every time. Because you were like, you kind of know which way it's going to go, but you also are waiting for it to unfold in a way that you're not anticipating. That's what keeps the excitement. And so every brand should essentially have, uh, a formula on how, what the sequence in which they want to engage. There is no formula to, you know, a great sequence. You can, you can start with just visual attention. You can start with, like, I showed you something that was something delightful to your eyes and wanted you to pay attention. And then I engaged something personal, relevant, and then I did emotion, and then I got memory. There could be one formula.

Mission: One.

Pranav Yadav: Or you can go straight in with like, oh, that started with an, uh, emotionally devastating scene and then got my visual attention and then created memory. So it could be whatever. But that, that kind of graph is what you own as a brand in terms of your storytelling.

Mission: Yeah. But with all of these, you have to have the core truth. Core truth in the beginning, or can it be somewhere?

Pranav Yadav: It has to come.

Mission: Okay.

Pranav Yadav: Either you have to use attention to keep people till the core truth is revealed, or you start with the core truth. Uh, but it should become obvious that you are heading in that direction regardless. And There are some very compelling storytellers who don't get to that core truth till a long time. I mean, I don't know how much attention I'd be able to keep with your podcast listeners or viewers, but when I was telling, I tell long stories. That's my format. Right. And as my brother in law, who would make fun of me all the time, is like, can we get to the conclusion? Because that's, you know, uh, purely because, you know, I'm going to connect things that you didn't connect before in the end. But it is my fun is in keeping you engaged through the moments. Right. And that, uh, is the thing that each brand has to solve for who do they want to be? If you're a Geico, you are basically using complete visual delight through the course. So I'm going to show you something absurd that does not make sense. Right. You're on a dining table with a family of four and everybody else is paused and the dog is just unleashed and licking people's faces and creating destruction. And I'm just going to brand Geico at a point where I think you, uh, are going to create memory. So that's their formula. They keep it that way.

Mission: It's going to be so interesting going out in the wild and like now looking at the different formulas that these brands have and also seeing the ones that don't hit with like, there's no, at least no truth for me. I don't know whose truth they're trying to hit or maybe they're not even thinking about that.

Pranav Yadav: I would say more than 75% of the ads are, are not based in any core truth is. So much so that when we talk to our, we have a creative debrief before we actually take on the work. Most people can't even articulate what that core truth is.

Mission: I was actually going to ask you that, like how hard it is for some of these brands to come up with what that could be like. I feel like that could be a whole year long journey trying to figure it out and people just throwing out their own biases of what the truth is for the brand. And no one actually like, yeah, that seems like a hard thing to get to.

Pranav Yadav: Yeah. But here's the thing. You don't need a core truth for the brand. I mean, you need a core truth for the brand, but that's not what you're solving for. You are solving for the core truth of the audience that you are talking to.

Mission: That specific one.

Pranav Yadav: Yeah, that specific one is what the entire strategy is Based off. And uh, yeah, people miss that because oftentimes the marketer is certainly not the person that they're trying to sell to. And so therefore their truth, much like Alexander and the Gymnosurfist, is very different from the truth of the other party. And that lens is the reason why marketing gets a bad rep. Yep.

Mission: So I could see someone seeing your technology and then being eager to just go the hyper personalization route. That's obviously what's needed. And I mean this might be one of your most provocative claims that you said to me, but I think you said that hyper personalization is not just unproductive, it can be destructive. And so I want to hear more about your thinking around this, if you still believe this. Um, and yeah, tell me more because this is a big conversation that I've heard over the past couple of years on marketing trends.

Pranav Yadav: I, I think, I think there is no better way to destroy society than to create hyper personalization.

Mission: Tell me more.

Pranav Yadav: Um, and you spoke about connecting dots earlier. I'm sure you've read Sapiens and your audience, you know, knows the book and knows the thinking of Yuval Noah Harari as he describes the world. And what amongst all the factors that could potentially lead to the humans becoming the conquerors of. Of Earth, what led to that happening? You know, there was. There was no other animal group that could actually coordinate with such large masses of people across large geographies. That pretty much what led to us becoming us. M. Right. Elephants could. Could coordinate in groups, but not large enough, not large enough distances. I mean, very talented animals, elephants. But that's kind of what led to us doing what we did and everything. All our achievement, movement of teams, wars, conquering all of that good things, bad things have essentially relied on that one factor that we are able to create. Culture, common myth, common stories that can get masses of people to move in a certain direction. What happens when you actually create hyper personal content? Even when you and I are in the same experience like we are right now, you and I are about to take different memories from the same experience. I'm sure you know for that to be true, but it's a great little thing for you to. For it to sink in every single time. Two people going through the exact same experience are going to actually store different things from the experience.

Mission: I see it. I have an identical twin and we see it all the time like we had the same upbringing. I was there for that.

Pranav Yadav: Yes.

Mission: Why was that so traumatic for you? I experienced the same thing and that was nothing for me. So yes, exactly.

Pranav Yadav: Exactly. So and if that is true, even when you're experiencing the same thing and culture requires us to experience the same thing, imagine a world where there is no common thing to experience. If all of marketing is you, me, everybody, all content, basically self validating, only seeing me, seeing the kind of stories I like and the things that I want, etc, etc in a way that nobody else sees. I don't know man. I think that's, that'll drive me crazy eventually. All of us crazy. There's nothing for us to relate to. And the only reason why we survive is because we find that that relation with, with other people and the human connection. And so I think it is fundamentally flawed in its assumption also to look at human reward systems. So that's uh, my business argument to these guys. Because saving humanity is not something that will convince them. But like the human reward system which is, you know, places so much value in how society sees me, society values me, how this is going to be perceived by others. Hyper personalization essentially is the killer of the very thing that motivates me. Um, so, so if I have to tell the businesses, please put this clip out to them. But at the same time I actually think it has the fundamental roots of the beginning of destruction of society if we do that.

Mission: Wow. I mean I also am just hearing that it's a very, it could be short term thinking, sure, you might get another purchase in the moment, but long term, if you're ruining that cultural like memory that could be created and a movement and people relating to each other, like long term it's not good for your business and society, short term might feel good.

Pranav Yadav: Of course. Yeah. I mean short term, the only reason why it'll feel good is that because you're going to feed off of existing common cultural memory, you're still going to use it, but then you're going to hyper personalize and get value, you know, in another way. But 10 years from now, when there's no common cultural memory left because everything was hyper personalized then basically we've already. One of my favorite poets writes this poem, it's in Urdu. It talks about words and the words it personifies as people and it talks about the meaning of the words as the soul, like it is for a human being. And the first line of the poem is like I feel it is as if someone has conspired to take words away from their meaning, like bodies away from their soul. Uh, and basically he paints this picture, it feels like we've created so much noise that where these soulless words or meaningless words are marching to the tunes of their masters. M But they're walking like zombies and eventually will basically drop into nothingness. And then of course, there's a positive part of the poem and where he says that. But I believe there are men and women out there who won't let this happen. And I think this is kind of like that. It is kind of like that because in the infinite creation age that we are about to walk into, and there should be no doubt that there is that right. The capability of the human mind to grasp all of that signal or grasp the signal from the noise remains limited. And therefore everybody will try to find ways to stand out, like create the signal from the noise. And these people think that the signal is going to come from hyper personalization. And they could not be more wrong. The signal should come from finding the unsaid truths of society. Why are we living in a place where everything seems like it's better? We're in the age of AI, but everybody is feeling worse. Everybody is. Why does it feel like that? What are the truths of people right now? Can I do the work to get there? Because if you can, you could make more money than anybody else if that's what motivates you. But that is the only way to get to that rather than the short term titillation that we spoke about.

Mission: Yeah. Wow. And I feel like we could have so many extra conversations that just go off in so many different ways. Okay. When thinking about the. The cultural experience piece, what came to mind earlier was Super Bowl. And when I think about Super Bowl, I think like, I think at one point you said maybe like 90% of these brands, they're not getting stored in memory. It's not working. Even though there's so much money going into the ads that are shown on Super Bowl. Tell me more about. You know, to me, this is like a cultural experience. You're probably with other people while you're watching something. These ads, some of them seem like they hit some core truths. Although it feels like if I think back to it, they might be hitting it, but I don't know where I'm going afterwards. Like, ooh, that resonates. But I don't know what brand that was. So. Yeah, tell me more about how you think about Super Bowl.

Pranav Yadav: Yeah, I mean, see, the super bowl is sold on the premise from. From 100 years ago. I'm going to get you eyeballs. You pay me money. Right? So that's the premise. I'm going to get you more audience than you can get otherwise and therefore I will price myself. Now, they're not wrong. They've done their job. Now it's on you to figure out how you're going to utilize that moment when the eyeballs are on you. Right? Like I said, attention is just a cost of entry. It's like table stakes. But then, um, now that you're there, what are you going to do to tell that story? And it doesn't. Again, our truths always don't need to come in the format that you're seeing me, right. I'm, you know, I'm self aware enough that people classify me as like, oh, slightly more academic, a philosopher type, talks about deep things, society, etc. I mean they don't know that 10 years ago I was hanging off of chandeliers in nightclubs. Um, and that's not something that they. Even when they're introduced to the idea that they'd want to associate with me because this is the brand image that they'd want. Right? Same way when I talk about deep truths. There are some trivial truths about us and I think it has been shown in super bowl in the past where silly group humor is a truth about us and we enjoy that. Um, and so it doesn't always need to be serious, but it has to be true. Do I think brands are doing. I mean I think they're increasingly getting worse over time because we measure super bowl every year and have done it for the past decade. I would even point you and this is like the biggest kind of. Even if you look at the ad meter, which is wrong, uh, and nothing but self reported answers, you will see that average rating of the ads has gone down over time and that showcases nothing except for what people previously hold in their memories. Without recalling as the standard for what a Super bowl ad should be and what it should make you feel. These ads these days in this year or the previous year have been generally worse on average. But when we actually started looking at the brain response, what is true is that over time, if we ignore the past couple years, advertisers did do a better job of creating higher emotional intensity because invested in celebrities, they invest in a certain kind of music, they buy rights to songs that are already hits. So they put in the right ingredients that should basically capture more attention and create more engagement. But they certainly fail at being able to identify which parts of the story are turning into memory and placing themselves there. I mean I. We spoke about the iconic Budweiser example last time we spoke where you know, there's an ad number One on the ad meter, by the way, that year. And also identified in one of the magazines as the top 50 Super bowl ads in the past 30 years. Number one on that list also. That essentially has. I don't know if you've seen it. It's called. It's called Lost Dog or Lost Puppy. I'm.

Mission: Oh, okay. Yes, I do think I've seen this one. Yes, it's very emotional.

Pranav Yadav: If it's that you're on a farm, you know, it's a horse farm, stud farm. And then there's a little puppy that the owner owns. And on one day, the puppy leaves the house and gets lost. And now the sun is setting and the owner is a little worried. And the music, you know, gets a little tense and like, you know, the sun is about to set and the clouds begin to thunder, and, like, there's a couple of wolves who show up. And then you can hear the little puppy scared. And suddenly music rises up and the horses come in the background, and then the wolves run away. And then the horses kind of escort the puppy back to the owner. There's a lovely little moment between the puppy and the owner. Music concludes. At that time, a red screen takes over. Budweiser shows up. Right. A remarkable story. In terms of stories that have been able to create engagement and memory through the course of the story, there have not been that many. So I can see why some people thought this was a successful ad. But a successful creative or a successful story is not always a successful ad. The story carries the responsibility of looking at a truth and being able to communicate it in an arc that can follow a certain pattern. The ad has the additional responsibility for the brand or key message to be inserted at the time of memory creation. Because otherwise you've created entertainment and not an ad. And what happened in this case is that the musical crescendo happened. Everything happened, and the music died down. And you told the brain that the story was coming to an end, especially with the red screen coming over. And then you positioned Budweiser at the moment.

Mission: Too late.

Pranav Yadav: Exactly. Stop saving memory. And the answer is not always show up in the first three seconds. That is not the answer. But the answer is knowing when memory is created. And I think that's also what people get wrong. I think there's a rhetoric out in the world, oh, you need to show up in the first three seconds. I think that is also, if you're not a craft full storyteller, a disastrous way of being. Because if you come up in the first three seconds, then You've told the viewer this is what this is an ad for. And they may actually just switch off if they're rejecters of your brand. But if you want to convert them, you convert them on a truth first. And here's my other favorite kind of campaign that did that. When Samsung and uh, Apple were going head to head trying to get more market share, each party realized that they can't really grow in this market outside of taking people from each other. Right? But if you're an Apple user, which I'm 100% sure that you are, then you roll your eyes at the sight of Samsung, you don't begin to entertain the idea. You actually shit on people who show up with a different colored tick in your text messages. So how do I come talk to you and actually tell you to switch to Samsung because it's going to be better? How do I do that?

Mission: So Samsung, I'm poking fun at that truth that you just called out. Like poke a little fun at it.

Pranav Yadav: Well, that too. But what Samsung did, I mean they tried everything. First they created an ad called Ballerina. It's a beautiful little phone that turns like a ballerina. The moment we look at the Apple consumers consuming that ad, dip in memory. They don't even want to entertain the thought every other way that did, nothing worked. And then came this. The ad they called wall huggers. For the first 45 seconds, no Samsung reference. You're walking in an airport and you have a variety of people who are just sitting on that dirty carpet at the airport, sometimes under the bloody, you know, water fountain, sometimes in another corner, just try and get like more juice into the phone because the battery is dying. And then eventually 45 seconds in a nice person whose friend has an Apple phone who's uh, like, do you want to get some juice? He's like, no, I'm fine. It's like, what phone are you using? Samsung. Okay. That's the most successful acquisition campaign they have ever run because they.

Mission: Oh wait, so, so break this down now. When was the memory? The core truth piece I got, when was the memory?

Pranav Yadav: Memory through the course of the moment. And then there was one person who's not facing the problem. And in that revelation of like, what is the answer? Because it quite literally was going to be an Apple ad, the answer was Samsung. So Samsung embedded themselves at the moment of memory creation of the solution.

Mission: Got it. So smart, genius. And you know their metrics or is that out there talking about it being the best performing?

Pranav Yadav: Okay, yeah, yeah. I mean we, we did the Work with them knowing exactly what this ad had actually done in market and they wanted to figure out what they did. Right?

Mission: Yep.

Pranav Yadav: Yeah.

Mission: That's cool. So then did you create more afterwards? And did they. I'm assuming they have a specific framework

Pranav Yadav: now, and 100% they also lost the framework. So that's a different story. As you know, in the past few years, I mean, it's uh, These organizations are big and change and with every changing marketing leader, they do things differently. But yeah, I mean, they use this at that point.

Mission: Wow. Um, that's cool. Okay. Okay. So earlier we were talking about hyper personalization and how that might be the end to society if too many brands do that. And a lot. I mean, I'm sure if you've listened to marketing trends, you know, a lot of my conversations are all around some of that, but specifically tied to AI, AI agents, these models that are being built, more data. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts around this whole world that you know, is very new, feels new. I know this is like 80 years of research that we're now just getting access to, but yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts around this whole AI agent, um, scene that we're in now.

Pranav Yadav: Yeah, I mean, see, again, you know, ah, what is that saying about half knowledge? Um, uh, I forget. But, but I think we're operating under that premise. I don't think people have taken the time to educate themselves on what AI is, how it came about, what it does, but in simple words. And it's not like I'm an expert either, but in simple words. The large language model is one of many large models we could produce. Right. And the way we are, where we are is that back in the day when GPT2 came out, it was the next word predictor in a string of words. Right. Trained on whatever is the largest prevalent data set was, which is the open Internet. At that point, we didn't know that it would completely revolutionize the legal industry or, you know, the marketing industry for copywriting, et cetera, et cetera, amongst other things. Now, language is an artifact of thinking. It is not the driver of thinking. Take that in for a second. Much like how you recalled your shirt being blue being the driver of your decision. That is how far you are from reality as you train the world on LLMs. So that's one piece. We'll uh, keep that there. Let's move forward with the LLM. Now. It was trained on the lowest hanging fruit that was out there. Correct. The open Internet. And then we're probably living in the world where 20 to 30% of all of Internet is now produced by an LLM anyway. So now it's basically training on the things that it's generated. Even if you are to go in this journey, the only thing that will essentially give you an edge from the noise is any kind of proprietary data that gives you additional insight into how what you're going to create. All of creativity is in the brain. Is the brain connecting data sets that were previously not connected. That is creativity in the brain and that is what creativity outside is, which is actually the antithesis of what we're using as creative AI tools in the market right now. It is quite literally based on prevalence. It rejects. If you are to look at a normal curve or a distribution of things that you are to find in the world, it basically is rejecting things on the tails which is what is creative and producing things that are prevalent. You are seeing purple on this because the most prevalent campaigns on this topic are purple. There is no information on uh, the efficacy of these models. And the reason why I'm passionate about this is that I've been talking about this for a long time but I think the problem, this has just made the problem way bigger. All systems are prevalence based systems and unless we input an efficacy based data set, which is what I do into this system, you're not going to actually do any better than you were able to do last time. You're going to produce average and mediocre with a lot more consistency which means that if you were terrible to begin with, you are much better off but anybody else is way worse off. So I think for this to be successful it will need infusion of data sets like this that bring human insight, human connection, human understanding to the decision making of this model and otherwise it really is going to hit a wall. The second thing is I think LLMs are destined to hit a wall anyway because of the first thing that I mentioned, which is that it is an artifact. It is, you know, it is a shadow of thinking. It is not the driver of thinking to which I mean there are some remarkable brains in the world. You know, you have Yann Lecun who you know is based like, you know the, the seed round of a billion dollars that he raised for, for AMI on this premise. And I think he's right. I'm um, totally in that camp that I think this is just one thing that we did and I think intelligence and what makes us act in the way we do will need to be attacked from a variety of different ways for us to be able to do that. And I think we're not far or we are far because that data is unique and sits with people like me. But in the future we will build a large cognitive model that essentially is a model of how we think. Meta showed in their most recent experiments with Tribe V2 that they can get into the zone of doing that. That said, the technology they used, the scalability of that idea, um, and understanding what is truly the top down executive decision making on top of that data, not just like which part of the brain lit up, but I think their experiments already show that we're going in that direction. So the world is going to do two things. LLMs will need to bring in other data streams that actually make it more articulate to speak to a human. And on the other side, we will actually need to create systems of a different kind of intelligence to be able to model behavior. Otherwise we're just basically throwing a lot of money at the wall by trying to get more data which is not going to aid or improve what we've created using LLMs.

Mission: Wow. Uh, okay, so tell me more about how you work with your team, how you keep them on the edge, the tails get cut off in the curve. And so like how do you work with your team to think big, think creatively? Yes. You have your data set. That really tells you a lot. But I'm thinking like I'm a manager or I'm at a, you know, at a certain company. How do I not become the AI slop that is just being trained from the shadows? And then how do I think outside the box and how do I get my own data right now? Like, what should that even look like? Lots of questions.

Pranav Yadav: Yeah, well, I, I think every organization or every group needs to come up with the things that drive them and things you align over and the truths that you go back to if you're lost and don't have answers. So for us, we have four of them and we call them our vows, not values. People bend their values. But these are vows which are, uh, non negotiables. The first vow. And by the way, everything in the company, including the review system, is based on these vows on how you performed across these four vows. The first one is make your subconscious conscious. And, uh, that includes a few things. Right? To make your subconscious conscious, you need to first feed your subconscious, which means that it is your duty to supply to your brain a variety of information and things across a variety of subjects, of a variety of disciplines, things that you're open to things that you're not open to, then you have to do the work to, to absorb them and have what we call the default mode network do its thing. It lives within you, it brews within you for a long time. And in the moment that of. Of need or creativity. The brain puts information together from places that you may not know where it came from, much like what we've been talking about. And that's codified within into the DNA of our company. So that's the first wow. Where we, we basically, you know, inculcate in people. The second one, excellence in all things. Third one is service before self. And that comes from the philosophy where, you know, I first used this analogy in relationships. But it is any kind of relationship, including the workplace, where if you have a two by two matrix of people who either save themselves in a case of fire or save the other in case of fire, then when two people come together, we're golden if you are the ones who saves you and I'm the one who saves me. And we're golden if I save you and you save me. But if you save you and I save you, I get burned. And so therefore, given the ethos of the company is saving the other. Every person who comes in has to care about the other. So we care about the mission first. That is the number one thing we care about. Then we care about our teammates. And if after that, if we've got any more juice left, we care about ourselves. That's the hierarchy of service before self. And last one is going all out holding nothing in reserve. It is basically working out till failure. At any one point when we begin to think about what is the decision and should we do it this versus that, we go back to this and somehow magically the answer appears. So that's how I keep the group aligned and actually the group keeps me aligned.

Mission: Wow, I love that. When I was just listening to you speak, the one thing that came to mind was if one of those ways to stay creative is to also consume a lot of different types of content. I'm like, there's a, there's some modalities and different plant medicines and things that can really open up your mind and have you have experiences at a rapid pace, while also you've got neuroplasticity happening and you've got different neurons firing in different ways. And my first thought was, of course politics. How nice would that be to have these leaders open up their mind by using ex, you know, exogenous modalities to inform them of new ways of Thinking that maybe they wouldn't have had before and then get into their, you know, and this is anyone actually. It's like being able to see different worldviews and experiences and be in the first person while experiencing things that you maybe can't in the 3D, at least as quickly could be a good.

Pranav Yadav: The first step still remains the same, I think. I think that's what people get wrong as they are. They're experiencing the modalities. They think the modality is the way to open, uh, absorption. It is not the absorption thing. The absorption needs, like the work needs to happen beforehand, if at all. And this is not medical advice, and I'm not a doctor, if at all. You are to indulge in that modality. That modality allows you to connect the dots within the information that you may have consumed beforehand. It is not about the information that you're consuming in that moment. And I do think people falter a lot thinking that that modality is the answer. It is not the answer. It is just the opener of the doors of things that actually, uh, already exist within you. So the work of consuming more is still there for you to do.

Mission: Yeah. What do you think about ideas being channeled and coming to you? And it's actually not coming from your subconscious or anything that you've experienced in this world, but you're actually channeling something else to have these ideas come through to you.

Pranav Yadav: Yeah. And at this point, we are getting outside the realm of neuroscience. So I will just declare that, yeah, I think, I think I believe in the possibility. So just to create a fundamental distinction, right. Neuroscience believes that consciousness begins and ends in the brain. That's what most neuroscience neuroscientists in the world believe. So putting that worldview aside, and this is my personal worldview, that there's enough evidence that consciousness does not emerge from the brain. But because it is hard to prove, and science wants hard proof, we are denying, and we have forever done this, by the way, we are denying a truth, its place in our worlds at the lack of scientific, quote unquote, scientific evidence. That said, you know, I would say Dr. Richard Silberstein, who invented the technology that we used, essentially has published a paper with monozygotic twins showing that they can actually communicate at a distance, fundamentally destroying that assumption that consciousness is based out of, you know, of the brain and is matter dependent completely to that end, there could be consciousness not just at the individual level and at the universal level. Tapping into a greater pool can allow for ideas to flow. In fact, I would say. I think they say it because they're poets. Most poets in the world will claim that poetry is not something they come up with. Poetry is something that flows through them. And so there may be some truth to that. And I buy into the argument. But yeah, there's a fundamental distinction. I just wanted to delineate the signs from what otherwise may be possible. And I think all of these things are happening in parallel. Um, it is the choice that we choose to make about being one or the other. It is true that I am a sum total of my subconscious memories and experiences. Uh, that's most of my decision making and experience. It's true that sometimes I feel that the other is true too. Why can't both be true? Um, and if we need to solve for it, what do we solve for both at the individual, societal and business level? So those are choices to make. But I don't think tying down to one idea is the way to go. You know, accepting all truths is the answer.

Mission: Yes. I love this. I love this. Okay, so to wrap this up and end it on a marketing note, I really did want to hear quickly from you about measurement because I'm sure people at this point are like, man, this is a lot. And I'm still measuring on impressions and that's how I look at things. And so I know that you developed something called a neuro impact factor in Australia that really shifted the way all of Australia looks at measuring ads, I think. And so super fascinating. I want to hear a bit about this so maybe you can inspire others when it comes to how they think about their campaigns.

Pranav Yadav: Sure. So much like we spoke, everybody was trading on impressions, right? And, uh, the mafia in the ad tech ecosystem has enough people who gain from this system that the system is hard to change. So innovation often comes out of the ignored M media, out of whom is one such ignored media. Everybody knows that it actually has a deep impact. They've never been able to prove it in the way that the rest of the world wants to see. It's the same kind of problem, right? Like, can you scientifically prove it to me, man? How can you tell me that someone who looks at this billboard every day who then clicked on something on his phone, you know, 10 days later, didn't happen because of the damn billboard. You can't, you can't say that. And, and if my eyes didn't look at it directly, the fact that it was based in my. It was there in my peripheral vision as I walked a certain way or experienced something, it has an impact on you, it's just, you know, not provable using traditional technology. So they, they came to us and said, like, can we create a metric for quality of impact? And we thought about it for a second. Like, you know, uh, my office is in SoHo in New York, and there's a billboard here dominated by Calvin Klein, usually an underwear model. On this billboard at this entire time you're walking around SoHo, cool little neighborhood. You know, you're into like the whole design aesthetic, kind of mind frame. This is a nice billboard to have. Less than half a mile away is the Holland Tunnel that you take to get to New Jersey. That many people who commute in and out of the city take the ads that you see on that billboard, despite the same pretty much volume of people going, is only like two old white guys shaking hands with each other. And an insurance ad. They're only half a mile away from each other, but they have an entirely different impact on people. One is the commuter mindset, someone who's going back home or rushing into work. The other one is strolling through SoHo. Point that I'm trying to make is that there's a tremendous difference in the quality of impact of these things depending on the location. And what we did in Australia was like we went to every single location, thousands of those, to look at how those impacted people's brains who live in that city, and then created this thing called the neuro impact factor. That kind of became the currency of trade for the out of home media in Australia, because for the first time, you were not just buying impressions. You're still buying impressions, but you're adding the layer of knowing you actually have a choice. I could get fewer impressions, but I want that quality of impact from my audience and therefore I'm making that choice. That was just invisible to you beforehand. You were just making a walk wild pet. So, yeah, I think since since the OMA adopted the Neuro impact factor, the spend on out of home media in Australia has gone up in the past few years from being 7% to 12 and a half or 13%. So you can only imagine when we create better measurement, you can actually create better attribution and better marketing systems. For example, this podcast is an hour, something long. You will also create a snippet of it, which is a snapshot. You also write a bio that seems to describe you in a snapshot, but all of them are coming from the same exact thing. I want. This is going back to the definition of marketing, right? You're getting. It is the job of communicating the story that you want people to retain um, and by the by the people who are relevant to you. So that board always consists the same thing. If it's a Claritin ad and the sun is shining and you know it's the season and there's a person who's breathing a certain way with ease in that season that one billboard has told the story, a 30 second ad would. It's just a different medium but based on the same exact premise.

Mission: Well Pranav, this has been so fun having you on marketing trends. Thank you for coming on and weaving through all the different angles that I took you through. You are a good sport. So where can people learn more about you and your work?

Pranav Yadav: Well, I uh. Yeah, well thank you. Thank you for having me. People can, you know, for Neuro insight can go to NeuroInsight's website and I put my thoughts out on LinkedIn the most so that's, that's where to go.