The Founder's Story

Advertising broke because we optimized behavior so aggressively that we erased persuasion.

J. Brooks · Founder & CEO, GlassView

J. Brooks, Founder and CEO of GlassView
J. Brooks · Fort Worth, Texas
A letter from the founder
I · The System

Advertising did not break because we lack technology. The pipes are built. Inventory is commoditized. Optimization levers are everywhere.

Advertising broke because we optimized behavior so aggressively that we erased persuasion.

For two decades, I worked inside that system. Performance improved. Metrics got cleaner. Efficiency compounded. And quietly, the human disappeared.

II · The Diagnosis

Three weeks before my wedding, I was diagnosed with a progressive neurological condition.

Overnight, the brain stopped being theoretical. It became urgent.

I went deep into neuroscience not as a scientist, but as someone who needed to understand what was happening inside my own head and what might still be possible. The deeper I went, the clearer something became: neuroscience already understood emotion, memory, and connection. What it lacked was scale.

Advertising had scale.

III · The Missing Link

Trillions of dollars move through media systems designed to influence human behavior. If those systems could read emotional response inside live environments, persuasion would stop being guesswork. Connection would stop being abstract. Emotion could become a performance lever.

That was the missing link.

I was not the only one who had seen it. For years I believed advertising had lost the human. Michael Platt had spent decades studying how people actually make decisions. Together we realized the same thing: persuasion had become invisible.

GlassView connects large-scale advertising infrastructure with cutting-edge neurotechnology emerging from UPenn Medicine and its neurotech spinout, Cogwear. Instead of studying emotion in isolation, we validate it inside real campaigns, at real scale. Emotional signals inform media delivery. Media performance feeds back into the emotional model. The signals that drive outcomes are amplified. The ones that do not are discarded.

The result is a closed loop: better performance funds scale, scale advances neuroscience, and stronger neuroscience sharpens how we understand and support the human brain.

This is not purpose layered on top of profit. It is alignment between them.

IV · The Record

Before founding GlassView, I spent a decade in advertising building digital infrastructure and revenue systems at companies including Condé Nast, where I helped shape digital architecture for brands like Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired, and Reddit. I serve on the IAB Measurement and Addressability Board and was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in 2023. I hold an MBA from Columbia Business School.

None of that is why this work matters to me.

Condé Nast · Vogue · The New Yorker · Wired · RedditIAB Measurement & Addressability BoardEY Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist · 2023MBA · Columbia Business School
V · Why It Matters

It matters because I have two small children at home with my husband. Because a neurological diagnosis made the brain personal, not abstract. Because if we are going to influence billions of people through media, we have a responsibility to understand how they feel.

If You Are a CMO

You want to understand what your audience actually experiences, not just what they click. I would welcome the conversation.

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If You Are a Neuroscientist

You have breakthrough work that needs real-world validation at scale. Let's talk.

Get in Touch

We optimized advertising for efficiency. Now we are rebuilding it for persuasion. And persuasion, done responsibly, begins with understanding the human brain.

J. Brooks
Founder & CEO · GlassView
Fort Worth, Texas