Sam McNerney
Numbers person, word person. Brooklyn, NY
Consumer Insights & Research Lead | Brooklyn, NY
Consumer insights and research lead with 10+ years helping brands and agencies make decisions about audiences, positioning, and messaging. Founded Publicis North America’s first behavioral science unit; now lead McNerney Insights & Marketing, combining survey design, behavioral science, and clear communication.
Expertise Survey design & experiments · Audience segmentation · Brand tracking · Positioning & message testing · Data visualization
How I got here
Most survey questions just collect data. Mine are designed to pull you into a story.
The one you just answered pulled you into mine.
Last summer, I downloaded every email from my Gmail accounts, going back to 2009. More than 118,000 of them. Most of it was noise. I stripped that out, grouped what was left by who sent it and what it said, and turned it into a network.
What’s left is my career. It runs from psychology blogger to founder of the research and strategy business I run today, with a few sharp turns in between. Every turn left a trail in my inbox.
It starts in 2011, with a blog and almost no email at all.
I started a psychology blog, Why We Reason, and grew it to 30,000 readers a month within a year. The New York Times cited it. Scientific American published me.
The blog turned into a job: Executive Editor of 250Words.com at Simon & Schuster.
We’ve never met, but I would love to talk to you about a full-time writing position…
Then I jumped to advertising at Publicis, and got hooked on research. A psychology professor I met through my blog taught me to run surveys online.
Looking forward to meeting everyone on Monday (6/1/2015) at orientation…
I built a behavioral science practice at Publicis, and hired a researcher to help run it. We became part of how the agency won business: our research shaped pitches and grew existing accounts.
Dream job, terrible timing: I joined Flamingo on the first day of lockdown. The London qual agency hired me to grow U.S. quant. Two months later, I was let go.
We are all super excited about you joining us…
Many many congratulations again.
I started freelancing, and found I loved it. One early client, Hydrant, used my research to choose its packaging language.
So I stopped job hunting and started McNerney Insights & Marketing. Writing, research, and turning data into stories, finally in one job.
Inside the practice.
Here's what I've done with those skills. Three relationships, three different kinds of research, and a closer look at the work behind them.
2022–2024 · Long-term research partner
Three years helping Cleo get to know young
Americans.
Cleo is a London-based, chatbot-based personal finance tool for Gen Z that offers credit coaching and cash advances. Backed by more than $100 million in funding, it was expanding into the U.S. Over three years, I became its recurring research partner there, tracking the brand and investigating how customers and potential customers understood its products, competitors, and value.
1Who's heard of Cleo?
2What stands in their way?
3What are competitors promising?
2024–2026 · Agency partner
One project
became ten
brands.
I've partnered with Giant Spoon on more than a dozen projects, helping the agency sharpen strategy, test ideas, and make stronger arguments in pitches and client work.
- 10
- brands
- 12+
- projects
- 1
- pitch won, on
the record
Brands I've researched with Giant Spoon
2024 → 2026Re: Research Overview for Prebiotic Soda
Wanted to share some great news - we won the Olipop business.
Your research was a huge part of the conversation and won hearts and minds.
2024–2026 · Research partner
From children's streaming to the future of Texas water.
I've partnered with Shepherd on research spanning children's entertainment, transportation, and Texas water security, designing surveys that make complicated questions easier to understand and the answers more useful.
Water · Texas Water Development Board
What do Texans understand about the future of their water supply?
Statewide survey, tailored to each respondent's county
Transit · Austin Transit Partnership
How are attitudes toward Austin light rail changing?
Year-over-year tracker: 34% → 51% excited
Entertainment · Bentkey
What makes parents subscribe to a children's streaming platform?
Audience research, segmentation, positioning
Independent work · 2020–2026
The agencies and brands behind the work.
Direct clients, agency partnerships, and the brands I've researched—across custom studies, strategy projects, and Survey Roasts.
Agency partners & collaborators
- Ben Zumsteg (Disco Fizz)
- Big Cardinal
- Evidenza
- Giant Spoon
- Iain Carruthers
- Interact Brands
- Monigle
- Nimbly
- Paragraph Project
- Peter Spear
- Preacher
- Protobrand
- Quartr
- Sharley Consulting
- The Good
Brands & businesses
- Adagio Meats
- Alen Corporation
- Aphera Labs
- Bite Toothpaste Bits
- BlackRock
- Cargill / Craftiva
- Cheat Protein
- Condé Nast
- Duolingo
- Extend
- Fairing
- Fat Snax
- Genexa
- Heidi Carey
- Henry Ford Health
- How Now
- Human Improvement
- Huron
- Hydrow
- Indeed
- Looshi
- Marcella
- Marsh
- MGM
- Nespresso
- Rebesana
- Reebok
- RiseWell
- Shook & Stone
- Sleep Easy
- Sugarbear
- SunMed
- SUSE
- Tractor
Experience
-
2022–present
McNerney Insights & Marketing Founder
- Began freelancing in 2020, then founded McNerney Insights & Marketing in 2022. Lead quantitative research from question design through analysis and recommendations for brands and agencies.
- Served as Cleo’s recurring U.S. research partner for three years, running brand tracking and studies of customers, products, and competitors.
- Partnered with Giant Spoon on 12+ projects across 10 brands. Research helped the agency win the Olipop business.
- Designed surveys with Shepherd spanning Texas water security, Austin transit, and children’s streaming, including a statewide study tailored to each respondent’s county.
- Conducted packaging and brand-awareness research for Hydrant; findings informed packaging language and retailer and investor presentations.
-
2020
Flamingo (Omnicom) Principal, Behavioral Science & Analytics
- Recruited to grow the consultancy’s U.S. quantitative research business and develop new research products.
-
2015–2020
Publicis North America Behavioral Science & Insights Lead
- Founded Publicis North America’s first behavioral science unit; hired and managed a researcher to build the practice.
- Led consumer research for Oral-B, Swiffer, Bounty, Citi, and Merck, informing client strategy and new-business pitches.
- Co-built three proprietary research tools—Prospect, Crosshairs, and Madeleine—used across the agency and the wider Groupe network.
-
2013–2014
Simon & Schuster Executive Editor, 250 Words
- Launched 250Words.com, a daily psychology and business-book publication, reaching 400,000 page views and 7,000 subscribers in nine months.
- Interviewed Arianna Huffington, Andrew Yang, and Robert Sutton; built publishing partnerships with Fortune, Fast Company, and Inc.
-
2011–2013
Freelance Writer
- Built two psychology blogs—Why We Reason and Big Think’s “Moments of Genius”—to 400,000+ combined page views.
- Both blogs were cited in The New York Times’ “The Stone.”
-
2012
Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) Barn Program Intern
- Won the agency’s Barn competition on a three-person team, earning a three-month internship with “Good Books,” a collaborative children’s-book concept.
Teaching
-
2023–present
The City College of New York Adjunct Professor
- Teach Consumer Behavior & Persuasion every spring in the graduate Branding & Integrated Communication program.
ResultsResults for clients
The newsletter is where I experiment. This is where the work changed something in the room. Selected client outcomes, endorsements, and project wins.
win
via
February 1, 2025
Helped Giant Spoon win the Olipop business.
Research that shaped the pitch and gave the team an argument that landed.
Wanted to share some great news — we won the Olipop business. Your research was a huge part of the conversation and won hearts and minds. Looking forward to working more together in the very…
— Corbin, Giant Spoon
praise
via
October 30, 2024
Research and strategy work earned direct praise from Lyft’s CMO.
A reminder that when the research section is good, people notice it — not just researchers, but the client’s senior leadership.
It went extremely well. The CMO and I were JUST talking about how we were so impressed by the research and strategy sections today.
— Corbin, Giant Spoon
campaign
via
2025–2026
Ran the statewide survey behind Texas’s water-awareness campaign.
Designed and analyzed the study, then presented the findings to the agency’s communications leadership.
Quote coming.
partner
2022–2024
Three years as Cleo’s brand tracking and research partner.
Ongoing consumer research and broader brand tracking work, not as a one-off project but as a trusted research relationship.
US market research contractor who has supported us with our consumer research & broader brand tracking surveys to date.
— Roxanne Nejad, CMO, Cleo
investors
2021–2022
Awareness work that ended up in investor and retailer decks.
Helped Hydrant on pack-claims work and an aided/unaided awareness study that became useful well beyond the research team itself.
The aided/unaided awareness study work you did for us has been super helpful and is being used in pitch decks by my team to retailers and by me to investors.
— John Sherwin, Founder, Hydrant
That's what I do for clients.
That's most of the story. But there are a few other things I do.
This story started by looking at over 118,000 emails.
But there's one that stands out.
It arrived in 2015, and it taught me how to run a survey.
I’d met Jon Jachimowicz, a professor at Columbia, back when I was writing my psychology blog. While I was at Publicis, he showed me how to run online surveys with Qualtrics and Mechanical Turk.
I got hooked on one idea.
A survey could have a plot. Each question could set up the next, like scenes in a story. I loved writing that story as much as reading the results.
Eleven years later, that’s still my job.
That email led me into market research, and to the work I do today: asking better questions, finding the story in the data, and making it useful.
This whole story is made of emails between people.
Want to add one?
Writing & speaking
- Published in Scientific American, The Washington Post, Fortune, TechCrunch, Psychology Today, and BBC Focus.
- Delivered talks on research and behavioral science at Unilever, IDEO, and Publicis Groupe.
Education
-
2008–2011
Hamilton College B.A., Philosophy
- Graduated 2011.