Certain mysteries have plagued humanity for generations. Why do men need three monitors to play a video game? Why will a guy who considers 15 minutes in a department store an intolerable act of human suffering happily spend three hours comparing fishing rods, motorcycles, or golf gear? And why, after decades of evolution, does watching another man do something spectacularly stupid remain so reliably entertaining for men?
Dr. A.K. Pradeep thinks he has some answers.
The neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author of neuroAI: Winning the Minds of Consumers with Neuroscience-Powered Gen AI has spent much of his career studying what happens beneath the conscious mind when consumers encounter brands, products, and advertising. Today, as founder and CEO of Sensori.AI, Pradeep is taking those insights and embedding them into algorithms designed to evaluate advertising, innovation, packaging, and brands.
And lately he’s been spending a lot of time thinking about men’s brains.
At the start of our interview, Pradeep told me he recently gave a full presentation on the male brain to an audience at a major retailer in Bentonville, Arkansas. He called it “Decoding the Male Brain,” and the premise was straightforward: If brands want to reach men, they should understand what actually gets their attention first.
According to Pradeep, 10 major platforms activate the male brain, several of which become particularly potent with younger men. The first he calls “fight, bleed, win.”
“The capacity and the willingness to fight, to bleed and to win is compelling for the male brain, especially the young male brain,” Pradeep said.
“Think Spider-Man perched high above the city. Competition. Risk. Victory. The opportunity to prove you can do something difficult and come out on top.”
Young men, Pradeep argues, have a particularly strong desire to develop mastery and demonstrate it. Advertising that lets them imagine themselves becoming better, faster, stronger, or simply more capable can tap into that drive.
Then there is speed. Whether the object in question is a sports car, motorcycle, road bike, or a pair of skis, Pradeep says the attraction is remarkably consistent. Borrowing from Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights, he describes it as the desire for “hot, nasty, badass speed.”
Other male-brain triggers on his list include the macho, primal, and sensual; stupidity and risk-taking; adventure and the outdoors; the “command center”; status and legacy; tribalism; and the scoreboard. That last one becomes especially interesting when you consider the modern young male consumer.
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The scoreboard is everywhere. It’s the weight on the barbell. The number of reps. The gaming rank. Young men, Pradeep says, are constantly measuring themselves against themselves and against one another. “The tribe, the home field and crew, big time for young male brains,” he added.
And then there is the command center. You know the room. It may look like a bomb went off everywhere else, but somehow the gaming setup contains three perfectly positioned monitors, multiple controllers and enough technology to launch a small satellite. That, Pradeep says, is no accident.
For advertisers and retailers trying to attract male consumers, Pradeep believes one of the biggest mistakes happens before the campaign even begins. We have built environments men don’t particularly want to inhabit. He calls them “inhospitable regions.”
“Almost all retail environments are inhospitable regions for men,” he said. “It never makes a man want to tarry.”
Pradeep believes retailers and advertisers also need to reach below that rational layer because most of what drives human behavior isn’t happening there. “95 percent of human decisions and desires are in the nonconscious,” he said.
Whether or not consumers can articulate why something appeals to them, their brains constantly process far more than the literal words in front of them: facial expressions, pauses, tone, familiarity, novelty, threat, belonging, and countless other signals.
Desire has a formula. Pradeep describes Sensori.AI as an “algorithmic neuroscience” company. Instead of putting consumers in headsets and measuring their neurological responses every time a brand wants to evaluate an ad, Sensori.AI embeds neuroscience-derived insights and nonconscious consumer data into algorithms.
The company applies those algorithms across four major areas: advertising, innovation, packaging and branding. At the center of much of that work is one deceptively simple question: Does this make somebody want it?
Pradeep recalled growing up in a low-income family in India, where getting a cold Coca-Cola on a hot summer day was a rarity. His father would pour it into a small glass. “At that moment, when I drank it, I felt like a million bucks,” he said. A construction worker finally sitting down after hours on the job. Someone stepping into a hot shower after a miserable day. A consumer allowing themselves one small luxury that, for a few minutes, changes how they feel. “Self-worth is not about the items you have,” he explained. “It is about the feeling it evokes.”
For advertisers, that distinction is enormous. If desire pulls consumers toward something, the amygdala can provide another kind of motivation. Fear. Anger. Pain. Sadness. Disgust.
Pradeep argues that these limbic triggers can be particularly powerful when communicating with men, provided brands don’t turn every commercial into an emotional hostage situation. Take something as mundane as a fishing rod. A conventional ad might explain its materials, strength, and performance. Another might quietly introduce a different thought: What happens when you’re standing in the water with your buddies, and you’re the only guy who hasn’t caught anything? Now the product isn’t simply a fishing rod. It is protection against failure.
That doesn’t mean advertisers should spend their days identifying insecurities and hammering consumers with them. Pradeep explicitly rejects that idea. “I would never want to live in a world where every ad triggers some deep-seated insecurity and fear in me,” he said. “It’ll be a horrible world.”
But pretending those fears don’t exist isn’t particularly authentic either. The strongest marketing isn’t built entirely on cheerful sunny days. People tend to feel closer when someone understands the difficult parts too: the frustrations, fears, and problems they don’t necessarily announce. Pradeep believes brands work much the same way. A brand endlessly promising happiness to someone working two jobs may not feel optimistic. It may simply feel like the brand isn’t paying attention.
This is ultimately where Pradeep sees Sensori.AI separating itself from the seemingly endless parade of AI companies now promising marketers some version of faster, smarter, and more automated. Generative AI itself isn’t the differentiator. The intelligence underneath it is.
Pradeep says Sensori.AI’s advantage comes from three things: its collection of nonconscious consumer data, the neuroscience embedded in its algorithms, and its ability to apply that algorithmic neuroscience to evaluate advertising, innovations, packaging, and brands.
The goal is not simply to determine whether consumers say they like something. It is to understand whether the underlying ingredients of desire are there in the first place. And desire, Pradeep argues, requires maintenance. Brands can lose it just as people can. A brand that once felt exciting can eventually become “Grandpa’s brand.” Familiarity remains, but novelty disappears. The relationship is still technically intact, but the spark is gone.
Pradeep compares it to a romantic relationship. Initially, desire may seem effortless. But if you stop replenishing and revitalizing the relationship, eventually both parties may wonder why they’re still together. Consumers do the same thing.
Consumers don’t have relationships with our strategy decks.
They don’t fall in love with messaging architecture.
They feel something. Or they don’t.
And for Pradeep, figuring out why they feel it is precisely where neuroscience becomes useful to advertising.
As for men? Give them a challenge. Give them something to master. Give them a tribe, a scoreboard, a little danger, and perhaps something unnecessarily fast.
And apparently, it doesn’t hurt if Will Ferrell is involved.
You can learn more about Dr. A.K. Pradeep’s work at Sensori.Al.
Amy Pais-Richer is a published author, screenwriter, and former advertising creative director.
