The author · Dr Laurent Flores
Thirty years in insight, one thread.
Entrepreneur, practitioner, researcher. A career built on three continents, inside the leading research houses and at the edge of academic innovation. One thread runs through all of it: innovation that actually works, in service of marketing decisions.
Inside the big research firms: Ipsos, Kantar (Millward Brown)
In the US and across Europe. The craft learned at the heart of the leading research firms — the rigor of panels, the protocols, perception measurement, ad memorability analysis. That's where the read on the market gets built: a fine-grained understanding of what works to measure, and what works to decide better.
CRM Metrix: an early mover in the online research and digital marketing revolution
In the early 2000s, the research industry hit a methodological rupture: the Internet made data collection and perception measurement far faster, cheaper, and more interactive — measuring the medium itself, while also using it to collect and amplify ideas. Dr Laurent Flores founded CRM Metrix, among the first to industrialize these approaches. More than twenty-five years later, the same kind of rupture is playing out with generative AI — and that's exactly what fuels the conviction behind FlashInsight.
ESOMAR: presidency and professional commitment
Past president of ESOMAR — the international reference for market research — Dr Laurent Flores represented the profession in global bodies, defended methodological rigor for online research, and supported the field through successive reshapings (open data, big data, AI).
Academic: Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas
Today, professor at Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas. Over the years, visiting professor at HEC Paris, EADA, Fordham University NY, and research fellow at CNRS. The academic role is not a trophy — it's an observation post: active watch on the latest research, scientific stress-testing of new approaches, and transmission to the next generation taking over. Most recent illustration: the peer-reviewed paper “Exploring Zero-Shot SLM Ensembles as an Alternative to LLMs for Sentiment Analysis” (Information Fusion, 2026), with Davy Cielen and Koen De Bock.
L'Atelier IA: transmission to the market
L'Atelier IA is the format chosen to transmit, directly to practitioners and leaders, what AI changes for research and marketing decisions. Not a lecture: a conversation among peers, with invited guests, on the actual state of the market. Practitioners and leaders come there to take stock.
FlashInsight: a conviction turned into a tool
FlashInsight is not yet another AI startup. It's the tooling of a conviction built over thirty years of practice: decision simulation has a place in the marketing process, between instinct and measurement, provided it's framed by a rigorous method. Method over Magic. That's what is shared. That's what is discussed, project by project, with brands and agencies.
“A read on the market that isn't a bet: thirty years in the field, paired with an active watch on the latest research.”
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Write to Dr Laurent Flores