Research Live Industry Report 2025: The client view
Despite a challenging business environment for many, clients are optimistic about the ability of the insights profession to deliver answers and shape strategic thinking. Strong relationships, deep understanding of organisations and wider market forces, and identifying opportunities for the biggest value and most efficiency, have all worked well for client-side insights professionals in the past 12 months.
In the face of continued challenging macroeconomic conditions and the pressure on insight teams to deliver more, with stretched resources, client teams are establishing ways of working that can help them have the biggest impact and continue to deliver insight that resonates across their businesses.
ITV’s director of insight Neil Mortensen counts himself “very lucky” to work in a team with “strong, trusted internal stakeholder relationships” and a deep knowledge of the organisation’s business units as well as the economics of the TV industry. He says: “These superpowers have helped the team deliver work that has driven many of the most important strategic decisions for the organisation, despite a really turbulent year.”
For Carlsberg, one of the challenges for the central insights and analytics team is that demand for its support generally outstrips what it can provide in terms of capacity, according to Jenny Syddall, director of group insights and analytics. To address this, the team has, she explains, been “hyper focused on identifying the big wins” in terms of where it can add the most value. Broadly, this has translated to the team dividing its work into engines (tools and resources where it can drive efficiencies and scale) and programmes (where it supports business teams directly on their needs, which often involves primary research). Syddall says: “This approach is working well for us but needs to be reviewed regularly as business priorities change.”
But Syddall is also “super proud” of the work the team has done to build capabilities in relation to artificial intelligence (AI). “We recognised early on that this was an area that we needed to own the narrative on in relation to insights and analytics, but in order to do that we needed to get up to speed quickly,” explains Syddall. “We have spent a significant amount of time understanding the landscape, clarifying the risks and opportunities, alongside identifying tools and resources that we could scale as enablers to ‘supercharge our capabilities’. Off the back of this effort, we were able to roll out a training program for our global insights and analytics community. We now have a good base for further embedding AI tools and approaches into our standard ways of working going forward.”
In financial services research, the requirements set by the Consumer Duty in the summer of 2023 have offered many opportunities for Axa to engage and harness insights, says the organisation’s Patrick Alcantra, strategic customer insight lead for UK and Ireland. “We framed the Duty as an opportunity to harness insights, building better outcomes in areas like products and services, pricing, customer understanding and support. It gave us a chance to talk to colleagues across the business, especially our leaders. There is still lots of work to do, and we anticipate that the need for actionable customer insight will be ever present in years to come.”
Ruth Hinton, group head of customer experience and insight at Vue International is “an insight team of one”, and with cinemas in Europe and films and audience profiles changing almost weekly, she is “all about efficiency”. Hinton explains: “What worked well in the past year was partnering with a small group of trusted agencies, who get to know our business and stakeholders; and producing carefully edited charts and summaries, which were used to repeatedly communicate key insights in lots of different forums.”
Hinton also says being part of client-side network Aura (she is chair) has offered “much-needed support and inspiration”.
For Claire Rainey, head of insight at Virgin Media O2, opportunities to augment existing knowledge have worked particularly well in the past year. “Where we have been able to build on previous projects with suppliers to not create something totally new, but rather deepen and extend our knowledge, has worked really well. I find businesses don’t always have the capacity (even if they have the desire) for ‘new new’, but a build and extension of insight is powerful,” Rainey says.
What do clients want?
A fiscally demanding context may be posing challenges for insight teams’ budgets and time, but when it comes to suppliers, it seems true partnership with good rapport is still high on clients’ wish lists.
When asked what he looks for in an insight supplier, ITV’s Mortensen says: “I could list out all the usual things like flexibility, rigour, innovation, cost effectiveness. However, if I think about the traits that set our trusted insight partners apart, they would be brilliant communicators, have great chemistry with us and our colleagues, and a good sense of humour.”
In an age of AI, Virgin Media O2’s Rainey also rates a personal touch from suppliers, but still has her eye firmly fixed on getting the basics right. “I look for something personal that makes me believe that they have unique ideas, and they are responding to my business in an individual manner, not a Chat GPT summary. If there is a typo or grammatical error, I am deeply suspicious of quality!”
Carlsberg Group, which has a global team, ideally wants partners who can work across multiple markets, says Syddall. But after that, “it comes down to chemistry,” she says. “We generally want to work with suppliers who understand the journey we are on and are equally excited about learning and evolving as we are.”
As a team of one, Vue’s Hinton says she looks for “true partners” she can treat as part of the extended team, as per the Working Well Together Charter (the pledge established by Aura). Being part of this extended team, says Hinton, involves sharing context and iterating solutions together. She says: “We need insights suppliers who are comfortable to work in this way – and will really take on board additional information and adapt. But, we appreciate, as the Working Well Together Charter also says, there comes a point when we need to leave agencies to do their best work by managing our side of things well. So, our insights suppliers should feel comfortable to push back at times, too.”
LOOKING AHEAD
Clients are broadly optimistic about the year ahead and the prospects for insight. Axa’s Alcantara says: “I am confident in the ability of the insights profession to solve business problems despite challenges. We are in the business of finding answers to questions, after all! Our inherent curiosity and resourcefulness, the mastery of our craft, and our ability to bring people together, will help our businesses thrive in a highly competitive environment.”
Rainey feels that whatever the future holds, there will always be more change, more unanswered questions, and therefore a demand for insight. “I feel confident knowing the demand will outstrip what we can supply,” she adds.
Hinton agrees: “Senior stakeholders continue to ask for, and be open to, insights which will change their decisions – and they accept a variety of qualitative and quantitative research as valuable evidence, to complement the readily available box office data in our industry. It gives me even more confidence, when I hear colleagues in different functions repeating accurate and relevant insights in meetings and proposals, when the insights have become theirs, not just mine. It’s always such a great moment as an insight professional, to hear your insights quoted back to you!”
Mortensen is “cautiously optimistic” about the UK’s economic outlook for 2025. He’s also excited about ITV’s slate of new shows and has confidence in the ability of his team. “We have some great plans for the year ahead and I’m confident that they are going to deliver lots of innovation and of course, great insights for ITV,” he adds.
For Syddall, AI is giving her most confidence for the next 12 months. “It’s exciting to be at the start of the AI journey and to be able to take ownership of how it can add value for insights and analytics work overall in our organisation.”
“I genuinely believe that it has the potential to supercharge our insights work across many areas, not least in reducing the admin burden that we all feel, freeing up capacity for more deep thinking.”
This article was first published in the Research Live Industry Report 2025. Download the full report here.

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