Think of the biggest marketing decision you will make next year, the one with a sizeable budget behind it. A launch, a new market, a shift in where the budget is spent. How confident are you that you will get it right?
Few marketing leaders would say they feel more certain than they did five years ago, even with more data than any team has had before. The problem is rarely a shortage of information. It is timing. By the time the data, the research and the right expertise come together, the decision has usually been made. Jeff Greenspoon, CEO of Kantar Americas, called that gap between what could be known and what you know when you decide one of the most expensive problems in marketing.
The good news is, when brands have the right information at the right moment, they can make decisions that build equity for the future. We capture that growth potential through Future Power, and brands with high Future Power are four times more likely to grow value share the following year. In other words, the signals of tomorrow’s growth are already visible today, while there’s still time to act.
That was the argument of Kantar Forward, our first live broadcast, held on October 20. We showed it working: new tools seen publicly for the first time, live demonstrations, and marketers from Kraft Heinz, L'Oréal and Essity describing how they already make decisions this way.
Here are the five places where the gap is closing fastest, and the question each one should raise about your brand’s strategy.
That gives marketers a new blind spot to manage. BrandDigital AI signals reads where a brand appears in AI answers, which sources shape those answers, and whether the brand's meaningful difference is actually visible.
The question for your plan: when AI does the answering, is your brand there, is it described accurately, and is it’s differentiation visible?
LaunchSignals, unveiled for the first time at Kantar Forward, shows how AI-powered intelligence and human expertise can bring together the right signals early to give you clarity and actionability, even in the early weeks after launch. It connects live digital signals with Kantar's measures of what builds brands, then turns them into a recommendation on what to change.
The implication is important. The opportunity isn’t simply to learn faster. It’s to act while that learning can still make a difference.
The question for your plan: for your next launch, what will you know in the first few weeks, and who has the authority to act on it before it’s too late?
Kraft Heinz is already working on that problem. At Kantar Forward, Will Cooke described how his team uses LINK AI to assess social and creator content at scale and connect platform performance to longer-term brand impact. By analyzing 18 months of social content with LINK AI, the team built a new baseline for understanding its longer-term effectiveness and contribution to brand equity. The pilot brought data and insight to an area that had previously relied heavily on what seemed to perform well or generate buzz and is already shaping briefs and 2027 content plans.
The lesson is that creators need room for their own voice, tied back to a clear brand truth. The goal is coherence, not identical executions.
The question for your plan: of the creator content you funded this year, how much do you know built your brand?
Kantar Live changes that sequence by bringing consumers into decision-making while there’s still time to act. It’s an expertly moderated online session that combines the scale of quantitative research with the depth of a strong qualitative interview. In the live demonstration, consumers answered through text, polls, heatmaps, voice and video responses. AI probed beyond first answers and surfaced themes during the session, and an expert debrief followed immediately. Speed is only part of the value. AI can accelerate the process but direct contact with real people is what keeps decisions grounded.
The question for your plan: which decision next quarter could benefit from hearing directly from real consumers in real time?
Consumer twins are digital replicas of people Kantar has studied over time, each built from and linked to a real research respondent. They do not replace real consumers. Instead, they offer a new way to continuously explore, refine, and enrich ideas before investing more time and money in taking them further. In the demonstration, 1,500 consumer twins diagnosed why a concept was falling short on relevance and uniqueness and helped shape two ways to fix it. Both routes were then retested with ConceptEvaluate AI, showing stronger results for relevance and uniqueness.
Alongside them, Studio, powered by KAiA (Kantar’s AI Assistant), brings Kantar's data, research and expertise together around a single growth question, inside the tools a team already uses.
The question for your plan: how many of your 2027 ideas will reach a real budget before anyone has tested them?
Kantar calls that Intelligence for Brand Growth. Jeff put the principle behind it plainly: "AI isn't our strategy. Your growth is."
Bring us the decision
If one of those five questions was hard to answer, let’s start there. In a Kantar Forward Growth Session, you bring the decision you are weighing for 2027 -- whether a launch, understanding your brand’s visibility in an LLM, a creative bet or a budget shift -- and we put the right data, expertise and new tools to work on it with you. Book a Growth Session.
Missed Kantar Forward or want to re-watch a section? It is available on demand to explore the ideas most relevant to your next marketing decision Watch on demand.
Few marketing leaders would say they feel more certain than they did five years ago, even with more data than any team has had before. The problem is rarely a shortage of information. It is timing. By the time the data, the research and the right expertise come together, the decision has usually been made. Jeff Greenspoon, CEO of Kantar Americas, called that gap between what could be known and what you know when you decide one of the most expensive problems in marketing.
The good news is, when brands have the right information at the right moment, they can make decisions that build equity for the future. We capture that growth potential through Future Power, and brands with high Future Power are four times more likely to grow value share the following year. In other words, the signals of tomorrow’s growth are already visible today, while there’s still time to act.
That was the argument of Kantar Forward, our first live broadcast, held on October 20. We showed it working: new tools seen publicly for the first time, live demonstrations, and marketers from Kraft Heinz, L'Oréal and Essity describing how they already make decisions this way.
Here are the five places where the gap is closing fastest, and the question each one should raise about your brand’s strategy.
1. AI now answers for your brand
When a consumer asks an AI assistant what to buy, they now get one synthesized answer instead of a page of SEO-generated links. Across 12 markets, 82% of people Kantar surveyed had used an AI assistant in the previous six months according to Kantar Blueprint for Brand Growth. What AI has learned about your brand now shapes whether you are considered at all, and a strong brand does not automatically translate to a visible one.That gives marketers a new blind spot to manage. BrandDigital AI signals reads where a brand appears in AI answers, which sources shape those answers, and whether the brand's meaningful difference is actually visible.
The question for your plan: when AI does the answering, is your brand there, is it described accurately, and is it’s differentiation visible?
2. The shift from measuring a launch to actively shaping its success
Two in three innovations fail to build meaning for the brand, according to Kantar's ConceptEvaluate data. The usual post-launch review explains that result after the budget is spent, when it is too late to change course.LaunchSignals, unveiled for the first time at Kantar Forward, shows how AI-powered intelligence and human expertise can bring together the right signals early to give you clarity and actionability, even in the early weeks after launch. It connects live digital signals with Kantar's measures of what builds brands, then turns them into a recommendation on what to change.
The implication is important. The opportunity isn’t simply to learn faster. It’s to act while that learning can still make a difference.
The question for your plan: for your next launch, what will you know in the first few weeks, and who has the authority to act on it before it’s too late?
3. Engagement is not the same as brand building
Creators now take a growing share of marketing budgets, yet Kantar research shows only 6% of creator content works for both the platform and the brand. A post can win the feed and do nothing for the brand behind it, yet likes and vanity metrics won’t tell you whether it strengthened the brand.Kraft Heinz is already working on that problem. At Kantar Forward, Will Cooke described how his team uses LINK AI to assess social and creator content at scale and connect platform performance to longer-term brand impact. By analyzing 18 months of social content with LINK AI, the team built a new baseline for understanding its longer-term effectiveness and contribution to brand equity. The pilot brought data and insight to an area that had previously relied heavily on what seemed to perform well or generate buzz and is already shaping briefs and 2027 content plans.
The lesson is that creators need room for their own voice, tied back to a clear brand truth. The goal is coherence, not identical executions.
The question for your plan: of the creator content you funded this year, how much do you know built your brand?
4. Insight can arrive before the decision
Tara Prabhakar, who leads qualitative research at Kantar, summed up the problem at Kantar Forward: "insight has a time problem." The decision is due on Thursday, and the debrief lands weeks later. So decisions often get made first and validated afterward.Kantar Live changes that sequence by bringing consumers into decision-making while there’s still time to act. It’s an expertly moderated online session that combines the scale of quantitative research with the depth of a strong qualitative interview. In the live demonstration, consumers answered through text, polls, heatmaps, voice and video responses. AI probed beyond first answers and surfaced themes during the session, and an expert debrief followed immediately. Speed is only part of the value. AI can accelerate the process but direct contact with real people is what keeps decisions grounded.
The question for your plan: which decision next quarter could benefit from hearing directly from real consumers in real time?
5. You can test the idea before you spend
The most anticipated part of Kantar Forward was a first look at Kantar's 2027 roadmap, work almost nobody outside the company had seen.Consumer twins are digital replicas of people Kantar has studied over time, each built from and linked to a real research respondent. They do not replace real consumers. Instead, they offer a new way to continuously explore, refine, and enrich ideas before investing more time and money in taking them further. In the demonstration, 1,500 consumer twins diagnosed why a concept was falling short on relevance and uniqueness and helped shape two ways to fix it. Both routes were then retested with ConceptEvaluate AI, showing stronger results for relevance and uniqueness.
Alongside them, Studio, powered by KAiA (Kantar’s AI Assistant), brings Kantar's data, research and expertise together around a single growth question, inside the tools a team already uses.
The question for your plan: how many of your 2027 ideas will reach a real budget before anyone has tested them?
The bigger shift is connection
Each of these tools answers one part of a decision. The larger change comes when they work together, all powered by the same intelligence.. So that intelligence stops being a report you wait for and becomes part of how decisions get made.Kantar calls that Intelligence for Brand Growth. Jeff put the principle behind it plainly: "AI isn't our strategy. Your growth is."
Bring us the decision
If one of those five questions was hard to answer, let’s start there. In a Kantar Forward Growth Session, you bring the decision you are weighing for 2027 -- whether a launch, understanding your brand’s visibility in an LLM, a creative bet or a budget shift -- and we put the right data, expertise and new tools to work on it with you. Book a Growth Session.
Missed Kantar Forward or want to re-watch a section? It is available on demand to explore the ideas most relevant to your next marketing decision Watch on demand.
