‘All I see is opportunities,’ says Kantar’s new CEO, Paul Zwillenberg

Zwillenberg brings with him a rich résumé from across the marketing, media and publishing worlds. Having held a number of account roles at agencies like McCann and DDB, he later held various senior roles at the Boston Consulting Group and was CEO of publishing giant The Daily Mail and General Trust. Most recently, he has been a vice-chair at Accenture, focused on media and entertainment strategy.

In a statement, Kantar Group chair Adam Crozier thanked Jansen for his service, making what Crozier called “a fundamentally better and healthier business than the one he inherited four years ago” (though since Bain Capital bought a controlling stake in Kantar from WPP back in 2019, taking the company private, it’s been harder to verify that from the outside).

Talking to The Drum today, Zwillenberg says that his early focus will be on maintaining a strong position for Kantar. “My focus is to make Kantar as relevant and impactful in the future as it has been in the past… I’m going to spend my first 100 days really learning the business from the bottom up, understanding how we do what we do, how we do it, understanding our methodology and all of the solutions that we provide.”

He arrives, of course, at a time of great and rapid change for the industry: the AI revolution in full swing, huge changes for the industry’s mega-incumbents like Kantar’s former owner WPP, and challenges on fundamental building blocks like remuneration models. But Zwillenberg says he’s bullish and happy to be landing at an organization that, he says, is ready for what the biz will throw at it. “The market is changing, clients are changing, customers are changing and we have to evolve with them… What I’m so excited about is the fact that Kantar is right at the center of that conversation: right at the heart of the evolution of branding; right at the heart of AI.”

The latter, AI, will naturally be a focus. Kantar is, he says, better placed than most with this new-not-so-new tech: “Kantar has been using AI for decades in various ways, shapes and forms. The opportunity is to harness the technology to create more insights, to more deeply embed that in brand and client workflows and to drive bigger impacts… We’re making that integral to our business, both for our teams and our clients… As AI evolves, we’ll be with them every step along the way.”

Why Zwillenberg’s been picked as the right man for the job is perhaps a question for his new employers rather than the man himself, but he says that his CV is one that fits into this future vision for the business snugly. “I’ve spent a career operating and advising great brands, great information services companies. I love research science, content-led businesses, working with brilliant researchers and brilliant engineers and brilliant commercial people to drive impact, to support decision making and to evolve businesses with new technologies. I’ve developed a playbook that I think is especially well-suited to Kantar. That playbook runs the gamut from investing and enhancing quality content and research to building software tools to integrate into client workflows and, more recently, developing and deploying generative AI.

“My vision is to make us as relevant and impactful for the next 50 years, as we have been for the last 50 years. I can’t wait to start.”