Charles Cantu Isn’t Just Talking About Fixing Ad Tech—He’s Actually Doing It

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Charles Cantu isn’t here to play nice, nod politely, and collect a meaningless trophy from an ad tech conference where everyone just recycles the same tired ideas. No, Charles is deep in the crushing it phase—the kind where his company, Reset Digital, is rewriting the playbook on programmatic advertising, empathy-driven targeting, and what it means to actually deliver results. Triple-digit growth since inception? Done. Emotional intelligence embedded into ad targeting? Absolutely. A future where brands actually connect with humans rather than just throwing darts at audience segments? He’s making it happen.

The Man Who Taught AI to Feel (Without Making It Watch Dr. Phil)

Neuroprogrammatic—just the name alone sounds like something a TED Talk speaker would breathlessly overhype, or some underground hacker in a hoodie would be whispering about on the dark web. But in Charles Cantu’s hands, it’s neither. It’s not some sci-fi jargon meant to dazzle investors, nor is it a gimmicky AI-powered black box that spits out vague audience segments with no real insight. No, this is something far more dangerous (in the best way possible). It’s a cognitive marketing powerhouse, a system designed to decode the emotional DNA of both content and creative, then stitch them together with the precision of a neurosurgeon to elicit responses that actually matter.

Let’s be clear—this is not your standard “hey, you left this in your cart” stalker-ad nonsense. No more endless retargeting loops where an ad follows you across the internet like a needy ex. No more tone-deaf messaging that makes you question whether a brand has ever met a human being before. This is about why people react the way they do. Why certain words immediately establish trust while others make consumers recoil. Why some emotions make a campaign resonate, while others just feel like a glorified PowerPoint deck someone dumped money into.

Charles put it best: “So essentially what we're doing is we're looking at, well, the backstory is we’re looking at every word in the English language. And then we started tying those words into, you know, which ones have the most weight in regard to how they make us feel. And then we tied those to essentially 65 emotions.”

That’s right. Not five. Not ten. Sixty-five distinct emotions. And this isn’t just some lab experiment with questionable sample sizes and a whitepaper no one will ever read. This is real. It’s already working.

“A gentleman named Nate Raikwitz, who used to work for A&E, HBO, Interactive Games, had perfected these models. So we bought his company and folded that AI in, and it performs like gangbusters,” Charles added.