‘You need a human compass’: Lea Karam opens behavioural consultancy
The Media Leader Interview
The rising star has left Mediaplus’ Behave to set up her own behavioural research consultancy. The goal? To reconnect brands to people as she bridges the old and the new.
“I don’t chase, I attract.”
Lea Karam, the behavioural scientist behind Total Media’s Behave consultancy, has left the agency to launch Mindscope, a new behavioural research consultancy she claims is the first of its kind for the culture, tech, entertainment and commerce sectors.
An “extension” of Karam’s personal brand, Mindscope will seek to “replace assumptions with behavioural data” to reveal “counterintuitive opportunities others miss” and “outpace change”.
Ahead of its official launch, it has attracted interest from some of the largest brands in tech and media: Google, TikTok, Canon and BBC iPlayer, among others.
Speaking to The Media Leader over a drink at Soho House, Karam describes feeling a “need to build” her own outfit to meet rapidly scaling client demands from such companies, each of which is seeking help in understanding how to tap into culture, address “content overwhelm”, map communities and adapt user and product strategies.
“There is this huge demand to really dissect culture,” she explains. “The world moves so fast, but we move faster to equip brands with tools to outpace change and stay relevant in the new era of influence.
“I think [we’re] ahead of the curve. Because everyone’s talking about building cultural capital — it’s not about the audience, it’s about the fans. Bringing all of this and making it tangible and human, you need a behavioural scientist to be able to do that.”
Growth ambitions
Mindscope launches with three core solutions: cultural coding, audience foresight and strategic planning.
Its branding was chosen intentionally to “reclaim the ‘mind’ prefix from non-behavioural scientists”, Karam says. Its visual identity depicts classical sculptures using contemporary tech like virtual-reality headsets and headphones — reflective of her interest in bridging “the old and the new”.
More granular focus areas the consultancy will offer (something that Karam refers to as “pillars”) include advanced consumer mapping aimed at uncovering high-value audiences; behavioural interventions that “transform audiences into communities and subcultures”; behavioural frameworks that “unlock category and commercial growth”; “culturally intelligent” strategies for streamers, retailers and tech companies; “positive-change” playbooks that aim to “make cultural good a strategic advantage”; and insights into Gen Z and Gen Alpha that can be used to predict consumer behaviour.
Dan McGolpin, director of BBC iPlayer and TV channels, has high praise for Karam, telling The Media Leader she is “one of the most insightful thinkers I know on understanding audience behaviour in this age of immense technological change and digital innovation”.
Working for the BBC, Karam has helped modernise the iPlayer brand, advising on making content findable and removing friction in the user experience.
Are all ‘views’ created equal? With TikTok, DCM, Total Media and Mindlab
Max Fellows, a consultant and founder of strategic growth advisory Allpoints whom Karam refers to as her “biggest cheerleader since day one”, will serve as Mindscope’s strategic partner and non-executive director.
“As we embark on a new era within the attention economy, understanding the patterns and trends influencing human behaviour and audience psychology will be the differentiating factor between brands that succeed and those that don’t,” Fellows comments.
“Mindscope is at the very forefront of the behaviours that shape and shake technology, entertainment, culture and commerce, helping pioneer success after success for tomorrow’s best brands.”
Karam has big ambitions for Mindscope. While her medium-term plans are to scale the business with “two or three” additional staff to help lead strategic insights for clients and potentially release a newsletter, she has eyes on one day expanding Mindscope to include clients from the US and Middle East.
Still, for now, success will be defined as managing a growing client list and “keeping the lights on”, she jokes.
Fluency in Jean-Paul Sartre and TikTok
Born in Lebanon, Karam began her career in a variety of communications roles in Beirut and Dubai before coming to the UK in 2017 for a master’s degree in strategic marketing at Imperial College London.
After returning to Dubai for a stint at Publicis Groupe, she moved back to London aged 23 to help found Behave within what was then Total Media and has resided in the UK ever since.
Expressing a fondness for Mediaplus and group CEO Tom Laranjo, she is grateful that the business took “a huge chance” on her at such a young age.
“I love Behave,” she reflects. “I’m really close to everyone. I built it from the ground up. It was my baby. But I feel like, for the next stage, I need to produce with complete creative freedom, complete financial freedom and complete [control] over decision-making to retain clients and scale.”
While at Behave, Karam gained attention for reclassifying the marketing funnel as a “loop” and arguing that brands and platforms needed to centre the importance of engaging with communities — both trends that have since been followed by social platforms and media agencies alike.
In a phone call with The Media Leader, Pete Stevenson, director of The Edge Picture Company and a client of Karam’s, pointed to her “bright, luminous intelligence”, adding that her brain is “firing at all times”.
A member of The Media Leader’s Future 100 Club (2024), Karam has become a mainstay at industry events, including hosting duties at this week’s inaugural SXSW London, where she is advocating for the industry to be more honest about what drives engagement with entertainment and advertising.
Karam is fluent in English, French and Arabic, as well as “both Jean-Paul Sartre and TikTok trends”, she quips. At 29, she positions herself as a “bridge” that understands young consumer behaviour and can communicate those insights to the C-suite.
“I don’t scan culture, I live in it,” she repeats multiple times.
Behavioural insights for ‘the right reasons’
According to Karam, today’s tech and entertainment products are “not human enough” and its “senior leaders are lost” in trying to figure out what appeals to younger generations.
“You need a human compass,” she says. While she frames Mindscope as a way to help companies build commercial success, she insists that her “ultimate goal” is creating positive cultural change: “An ecosystem that’s much safer, online and offline.”
Her “mission” is to work with platforms and others to make sure algorithmically recommended media is “designed in a human way, so they are safer and we can create a diversity of human thought”.
Keen to ensure the consultancy reflects her personal values, Karam is happy to limit herself to working with specific “interesting” brands.
“I choose my clients. I could never really work with someone that’s destroying the world,” she says. “I want to use behavioural insights for the right reasons.”
Her clientele does include social media companies, many of which have been routinely criticised for being unsafe for children and failing to adequately address negative externalities of their business models. Karam indicates that she hopes to help reform willing platforms from the inside by focusing on minimising risk and redesigning algorithms.
The benefits, she predicts, are not only moral but commercial.
“Mark my words: investment will shift from Meta to Pinterest and Snap; from Meta to gaming platforms,” she declares.
Karam speaks highly of outgoing Channel 4 CEO Alex Mahon, echoing her policy recommendations to require platforms to give algorithmic due prominence to public-service media.
She wants to create an “ecosystem where tech and broadcast speak to each other”, where broadcasters and streamers no longer look at young people as “living in a far away galaxy” on platforms.
In a statement to The Media Leader, Mahon said: “In a world overloaded with guesswork and noise, Lea cuts through with clarity and precision. She has always been fearless about questioning norms.”
Karam hedges that platforms are only “as good as their creators and audiences”, but that “every platform has a purpose” for different marketers and cultures.
“Il faut de tout pour faire un monde,” she adds. It takes everything to build a world.
Adapting to shifting media consumption habits — with TikTok, Spotify, Global and BBC