Announcing the Laboratory for Advanced Marketing (LAM)

Peter Drucker famously said that innovation and marketing are the only two profit centers in a business; everything else comes down to cutting cost. He defined marketing as understanding what customers want so well that the products sell themselves.

John Zweig, best known for running large parts of WPP for sixteen years, and also a U.S. combat veteran and professional jazz guitarist who played with Frank Sinatra, sees marketing as permeating all human activity. Each of us markets herself and himself. One has a dream and marketing is what translates that dream into reality. This is the larger meaning of marketing as persuasion which indeed is a central theme of communication itself. If we had never begun communicating with one another, there would be no marketing, but once there was communication, marketing automatically came along with it.

John is a co-founder of LAM, as am I. All three of us believe that it’s time for marketers to become leaders in inspiring the human race. This is our proposed broadest definition of marketing for the present dissonant age.

In doing so, we need to acknowledge the need for performance, short and long term, married to the nobler transformative repositioning of our marketing efforts. Win/win.

We also need scientific tools and we already have two: the Neuro-Insight technology and the RMT psychological encoding system which I helped discover/invent. We expect to help create more science and discover more empirical generalizations, and we are ready to work with everyone.

Dr. Richard Silberstein is the founder of Neuro-Insight and inventor of the Neuro-Insight technology, Steady State Tomography (SST), a patented system used in medical research around the world, which is to EEG as an electron microscope is to a mechanical microscope. The precision with which brain long-term memory encoding can be measured at each of the 52 Brodmann Areas in the brain by SST is why it is such a scientific and marketing advance. The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) has conferred awards upon Neuro-Insight for its ability to recommend small changes in commercials which greatly increase their performance. John Zweig is today the CEO of Neuro-Insight.

At least two groundbreaking empirical generalizations very relevant to marketing have already been produced by Neuro-Insight.

Conceptual Closure is the brain phenomenon which causes a momentary “blind spot” right after the payoff of a story in a commercial -- exactly the place where too many commercials decide to put their branding.

The Iconic Trigger is that shot within a commercial that contains the power to remind people of the whole message. This is valuable for extending the effect of video to display, print, outdoor, place based, collaterals and wearables -- even to a logo or masthead.

RMT has demonstrated the principle of amplifying a specific ad by placing it in contexts that align psychologically with the ad within an empirically derived battery of 265 qualities. And a second principle of sending a specific ad to people whose content consumption patterns can be distilled into these RMT taxonomies where again the resonance with the ad is why incremental sales effectiveness is significantly increased (typically +36% range for contexts and +95% range for privacy-protected audience IDs).

RMT has introduced a nuanced map of the subconscious that was developed from set-top-box data and a machine learning algorithm tied to a personalized program recommender. This human subconscious cartography will have endless applications across marketing, psychology, sociology and other related fields.

These are the scientific tools that will be used at the outset, with expansion in mind.

LAM envisions taking on assignments from clients who can see how a deeper understanding of what their customers and prospects want (following Peter Drucker’s advice above) -- consciously and subconsciously -- has to make marketing decisions better and lead to greater creativity and performance. The work is not just for those clients but also for the accumulation of more empirical generalizations that everyone can use in their own marketing -- and that people can use in their daily marketing of themselves.

Here’s John Zweig’s concept deck for LAM.

Marketing can play a much more valuable role, earn a bigger seat at the table and perhaps help the world sort out its present messes. And potentially inspire people to be all that they each individually are designed to become.

You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the whole world will live as one.

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