For Paul Zwillenberg, who was appointed in late 2025, the challenge is leading Kantar into a new phase of renewal, as well as adapting to a world of AI and increasing uncertainty.  

Zwillenberg’s background includes a spell as vice-chair of reinvention and global leader of media and entertainment strategy at Accenture. Prior to Accenture, he was chief executive at the Daily Mail and General Trust PLC, with the company being taken private in 2022, and senior partner and managing director at BCG, leading its global media practice.    

Zwillenberg joins Kantar at a time of change. The company sold Kantar Media to HIG Capital last year for around $1bn, with Kantar Media having been operationally independent since 2023. Kantar itself is 60% owned by Bain Capital, a deal that went through in 2019, with WPP retaining a 40% stake. Now with new leadership, the company has a new course to travel, and one that Zwillenberg is eager to help chart.  

“I didn’t quite realise it at the time, but I think my background is perfectly suited for the direction of travel for Kantar,” he says. “It combines marketing and branding. It is grounded in quality content and insight. 

“I haven’t seen anything there that I haven’t seen before. Likewise, when I triangulate that with the client asks, [they say] we want faster insights, we want more granular insights, we want you to use synthetic data or digital twins to allow us to test things. All those are things that I have worked in other companies to deliver several times over.” 

The process of adapting  

Zwillenberg says he wants Kantar to focus in the future on helping clients to understand their customers and further their brand. “My aims are to put us right at the heart of the next generation of marketing, branding and advertising,” he explains. “It’s to really be known as the company that delivers the very best intelligence for brand growth, and it’s doing that in terms of, again, providing the signal intelligence, the decision intelligence and the strategic intelligence that clients need to understand their customers and their brands today to make those real-time decisions that CMOs, CMIs and businesses are making every day.” 

To this end, Zwillenberg has four foundational areas of focus for the company, the first being “human-centric data”, using Kantar’s reserve of insight from research with more than 80 million people a year to provide the data needed to support technological innovation, such as synthetic data or digital twins. “We know from our own testing and trialling that pure synthetic doesn’t give you the accuracy and the robustness of the answers that synthetically informed human data does,” he adds. “Same thing with digital twins.” 

The other areas of focus for Kantar under Zwillenberg’s leadership are building on existing intellectual property, such as Brand Z and its Meaningful Different and Salient (MDS) framework, and a focus on its people and the expertise they bring, as well as democratising data.  

The final element is building on the Kantar operating system, with support from partners such as Microsoft, to unify the company’s data and allow clients to be able to use it in new and different ways. 

As with most of its peers in the industry, Kantar’s future challenge is centred on embracing new technologies, spanning AI, synthetic data and digital twins. Zwillenberg says its foundation is central to those development. 

“We built that insight up over time. We can now enhance that with synthetic profiles, with digital twins, and so it’s bringing the technology to bear with the human at the centre.”  

Zwillenberg adds that the company’s intellectual property – such as Brand Z and the MDS framework – are a key part of its prospects. 

“At the end of the day, it’s all in service of building brands; building strong brands that drive results. Brand is the competitive edge that AI can’t replace. Everything that we do is in the service of building brands,” Zwillenberg adds. 

“If you leave an [AI] agent to its own device, we’ll end up being focused exclusively on bottom of the funnel – performance, last click attribution – and miss the middle funnel and the top of the funnel, and the long-term benefits from that. When robots are talking to robots, how do you differentiate yourself and stand out?” 

Zwillenberg says that the insight industry is well set up to adapt to new technologies such as AI. However, he adds that companies cannot take their eye off the here-and-now.  

“It’s very easy to get excited about 2028 or what’s possible in 2030, but we all have businesses to run today,” he says. “I’m very focused on supporting, automating, speeding up and on bringing new tools to bear in everything that we do today, but also putting in the infrastructure, making the investments and charting the path together hand-in-hand with clients on where we’re going tomorrow.” 

He adds: “AI puts us in a position where we can have fundamentally more impact on our clients’ businesses tomorrow than we did yesterday, because we can plug in to their martech, to their brand tech, to their ad tech, and provide them with the decisions that matter.  

“We can bring so much more insight and perspective to help them make those strategic decisions that drive growth.”  

Pilot purgatory 

In a world where challenger startups are claiming technological advances, what is the role for legacy players? Zwillenberg’s view is that Kantar has advantages that startups cannot compete with. 

“A lot of clients are finding themselves in pilot purgatory, and they have no time to do their day job because they’re meeting with startups,” says Zwillenberg. “I think that what clients are looking for are a few trusted guides to branding, marketing and AI. Our role is to sift through all these options and opportunities to make sure that they’re done with the robustness that you expect. 

“I can’t tell you how many clients have come to me and said, ‘we signed up for this startup, we went all in, we’re testing this out, and the results just aren’t good enough’. Ultimately, many of them are starting to come back to us to say, actually, it’s not fit for purpose, it’s not delivering what we need it to do,” Zwillenberg adds.  

Many startups don’t have the intellectual property, longitudinal data and robustness in their use of new technology to meet expectations from brands, adds Zwillenberg, with some trying to use technology in ways it was not originally designed for. 

“I’ve seen this over and over again, whether it’s in commodity information or property information or insurance. There are lots of startups that bring good software and great user interfaces, but they never had the proprietary data or the IP that ultimately helps you make better decisions, that gives you a better view of your customers. Ninety-nine times out of 100, the innovation is great, but it’s not delivering that signal, that decision, that strategy that clients ultimately need to grow their business.”