AI: Powering-up Consumer Insights 2024

Shari Aaron, EVP, Growth & Innovation, Radius
Shari draws from her deep skills solving complex business challenges across the global consumer and B2B insights space to identify clear innovations, develop compelling propositions and drive growth in partnership with clients. As EVP at Radius, Shari optimizes brand offerings, providing cutting edge thinking that addresses new business realities navigating through the complexities of our world by blending proven human insights with cutting-edge tools and technologies. Having worked with distinguished clients including corporations, non-profits, SME’s and start-ups around the world, Shari is committed to inspiring the best in all of us and driving strategic vision. Shari is an in-demand speaker, author, and Advisory Board Member.  #humansfirst+AI

Ajay Bangia, Global Scale Lead, Ipsos Qualitative

Dan Barnes, Associate Director, Differentology
Dan has worked across both the data and research teams in his 6 years with Differentology, quickly rising through the ranks to his current position as an Associate Director. With a focus on new innovation, Dan spends much of his time working on campaign effectiveness research, working with a number of key clients across various media formats. Dan has a background in mathematics having completed his Master’s Degree in the field of applied mathematics. He’s also a huge sports fan and is always looking for a new sport to get up to speed on (this year it’s been an attempt to understand the stat heavy world that is Major League Baseball!)

Shayna Beckwith, Vice President, Radius
Shayna, Vice President of Radius, brings 15 years of market research experience and a diverse background in primary quantitative and qualitative research, along with data mining and AI techniques.  Her passion is ensuring that clients grow their brands, strengthen loyalty and build competitive differentiation. Shayna’s experience spans across a variety of industries including Consumer Packaged Goods, Durable Goods, Financial Services, and Technology. She is an expert in transforming data into compelling, actionable, and story-driven insights that drive engagement and actionability with key stakeholders.  As a wife, mom and senior leader in the insights industry, Shayna builds strong relationships because she commits to building strong partnerships. Shayna holds an MBA from Indiana University and a BA from the University of Florida.

Matt Blacknell, Global Dcomm Customer & Shopper Insights, Mars Wrigley
Matthew Blacknell is an experienced insights specialist who builds strategies for driving the value of the insight function.  His experience includes 6 years agency-side leading a wide range of insight projects across FMCG brands.  He is now in his 16^th year at Mars, currently leading Global Digital Shopper Insights.   He has proven expertise in leading insights strategies across marketing and sales functions.  Including the disciplines of driving consumer-focused brand & portfolio strategy, developing successful advertising globally and launching innovation.  His last 7 years have been focused on influencing the organization to be shopper-centric through a better understanding of Shopper behaviour. 

Bart Bilski, Data Scientist, Kokoro
Bartlomiej brings a robust background in Statistics and an MSc in Data Science from the prestigious University of Bath. His academic achievements include authoring a research paper on statistics. Since joining Kokoro, Bartlomiej has leveraged his expertise to integrate advanced AI and machine learning technologies into the MR field. His focus has been on harnessing the power of deep learning and large language models to revolutionize market research methodologies. This strategic shift has streamlined data analysis processes, enabling a deeper dive into market insights and trends.
Bartlomiej transforms data beyond information into actionable market intelligence. He provides detailed and rigorous analysis, guiding clients towards data-driven strategies for sustained brand growth.

Rose Crabb, Deputy MD, Discover.ai

Michelle Cusumano, Consumer Insights Manager, General Mills
Michelle Cusumano is an Insights Manager at General Mills, who spends her time connecting the dots between consumer behaviour and business strategies. With 19 years of insights experience, Michelle believes that understanding what drives and motivates consumers is the key to achieving business growth. Michelle has worked across a range of industries, including consumer packaged goods, telecommunications, apparel and healthcare. In each environment, she has a passion for ensuring the consumer voice is heard and brought into the decision-making process.

Melike Dogan, Insight Lead, the7Stars
Melike has 6 years of media insight experience working previously at large networked agencies and now at the7stars, the largest independent agency, as an Insight Lead. With a background of Psychology and Consumer Behaviour and expertise across a range of methodologies ranging from qual focus groups to quant surveys and trackers, she made it onto Campaign Media Week's 30 under 30 list for 2023 and was shortlisted for Mediatel's Research Rising Star in 2020.

Jem Fawcus, Owner and Group CEO, Firefish
Jem is Owner and Group CEO of Firefish, which he co-founded in 2000. He has led the business from its qualitative, youth-focused roots to a growing, multi-disciplinary business with offices in New York and London, acting as human strategy partners to clients including Unilever, Amazon and Anheuser-Busch.
More recently, he has been instrumental in the founding of the Insight Climate Collective which aims to mobilise the research and insight sector to address the climate emergency. 
Jem is an expert in using insight to drive brand purpose, communication development and innovation, all stemming from his fascination with human lives and our cultural context. Graduating from the University of Cambridge with a MA in Social Psychology, he also gets pretty excited about fly fishing, football and his chickens.

Angela Fernandes, Director of Consumer Science, Mondel?z International
Angela Fernandes is R&D Consumer Science Director at Mondelez International, leveraging 25+ years of experience in consumer research. Expertise in uncovering actionable insights to drive strategic decision-making for global, regional and local brands. Angela has been leading global teams, employing digital and agile approaches to understand consumer needs and preferences. Skilled in data analytics and translating findings into impactful business strategies. Expert at synthesizing complex data into compelling narratives, guiding product-pack development and marketing initiatives. Passionate about decoding consumer behaviour to unlock growth opportunities and enhance brand relevance in ever-evolving markets.

Suelyn Federle, Senior Scientist II Consumer Science, Mondelez International
Suélyn has background MSc in Pharmaceutical Science from the Federal University of Paraná, a post-graduation in Marketing Intelligence from NOVA Lisbon and a MBA in Strategic Management. She has worked with Sensory and Consumer Science in the last 13 years, with expertise in cosmetics and foods, and currently holds the position of Senior Scientist at Mondelez International. Her focus is delivery strong and actionable insights related to consumer behavior and product/pack solutions to delight consumers with the best experiences.

Betsy Fitzgibbons, Shopper Insights Lead - eCommerce & New Transactions, Mars Wrigley
Betsy Fitzgibbons is an accomplished shopper insights professional with over 20 years’ global experience in the CPG industry.  Her focus is driving future-facing retail strategies and identifying new opportunity spaces based on unearthing actionable insights. Betsy has spent several years pioneering new methodologies and tools, including the creation of Mars Digital Store Labs and exploration into Voice AI and Commerce. Her hallmark lies in crafting compelling, insights-driven narratives that resonate with internal stakeholders and external customer partners, and effectively support business objectives and drive growth. #proudlymars #humansfirst+AI

Laura Gillespie, The Score Director, Kokoro
Co-founder of The Score at Kokoro, the UK’s most up to date qual and quant sentiment tracker, Laura has the ear of the UK’s leading insight teams and their stakeholders; from Tesco to Ebay, to P&G, Legal & General and Deliveroo, Laura’s passionate, engaging tone, drives insight to the very heart of business – through C-Suite, finance, product and marketing teams to ensure decisions made are rooted in real world context.
A senior Director in the award-winning Kokoro team, Laura is passionate about plugging into people, trends and the world around us, living and breathing the brand promise of big personality and bright brains to switch on new possibilities and inspire change. For 13 years, she’s used advanced qual techniques seamless blended with quantitative intelligence to tell powerful stories. Regularly attracting several hundred clients to her weekly webinars, Laura continues to make a huge impact on our industry, and is constantly pushing to find solutions to better land her contextual messages.

Kat Hatton, Head of Sweet Insights, Premier Foods

Andrew Hui, AVP, Consumer Insights, TD Bank

Katherine Jameson Armstrong, Head of Media Qualitative in UK, Ipsos 
Katherine leads our Media and Technology qualitative business in the UK, as well as Ipsos’ AI thought leadership working group. She has a special interest in the evolving technological landscape, and how it affects behaviours, motivations, and relationships with brands and content. She regularly represents the company speaking at events about future tech trends, including voice, AR, VR, the metaverse, and AI.

Ben Kelsey, Head of Insight, Cambridge Design Partnership
Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP) is a versatile innovation partner, proficient in insight, strategy, and engineering. Our unique capabilities empower us to deliver data-driven behavioural insights, complementing conventional research methods. By leveraging our cross-capability approach, CDP automates the fusion of claimed and actual behaviour, yielding real-time insights for enhanced human comprehension, improved product design and richer user engagement. Ben Kelsey and Tim Murdoch will discuss CDP’s current work in behavioural insight: AI's role in enhancing insights research, particularly in; interpretation, segmentation, sentiment analysis, and real-time trend analysis of unstructured data. Ben leads CDPs consumer Insight offer. He has applied his experience working with research agencies to collaborate with multidisciplinary design teams at CDP. His focus is on developing tools and techniques to evidence human needs.

Ester Marchetti, Co-Founder & Head of Innovation, Bolt Insight
Ester is a co-founder and head of innovation at Bolt Insights, a data tech company that connects brands with hyper-relevant audiences. She studied at Bocconi University and has a track record of delivering impactful insights for global and regional FMCG companies, having worked at Unilever, Reckitt and Nielsen before Bolt.

Josh Muncke, Commercial Director, Faculty

Tim Murdoch, Head of Digital, Cambridge Design Partnership Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP) is a versatile innovation partner, proficient in insight, strategy, and engineering. Our unique capabilities empower us to deliver data-driven behavioural insights, complementing conventional research methods. By leveraging our cross-capability approach, CDP automates the fusion of claimed and actual behaviour, yielding real-time insights for enhanced human comprehension, improved product design and richer user engagement. Tim leads CDP’s digital offering and is actively using ML and AI with clients from a range of industries; from modelling recipes and human sensory responses to generating and refining marketing material for greatest social impact whilst meeting policy guidelines. His background includes co-creating M-PESA, the breakthrough mobile payments service in Africa and co-founding Waymap to provide AI enabled mobile navigation services for people with vision impairment.

Ade Ososami, Head of Analytics, Kokoro
Since first joining the Kokoro team in 2014, Ade has helped to build one of the strongest data science teams in the industry. Graduating from the University of Manchester with a Degree in Actuarial Science and Mathematics, Ade has a passion for learning, undertaking multiple advanced analytics courses; crucially, he ensures his knowledge is used to drive insight through client-side businesses. With his strong background in applied statistics and computer science, his speciality centres on multivariate analysis, statistical modelling (Linear, Non-Linear, Bayesian), machine/deep learning (segmentation & NLP), data visualisation (Spotfire), application development (R Shiny) and cloud computing (AzureML). A huge advocate of using AI wisely, Ade’s determination to push boundaries within ethical parameters has seen Kokoro stay ahead of the trends and develop solutions which benefit both the internal team and the end client.

Rich Owen, Firefish
A proven digital transformation expert over a 30 year career, spanning three continents and mixing research agency side client management, with technology starts ups and transformation and innovation roles. Now firmly focused on the opportunities and challenges AI brings to the industry.
He has worked on introducing a wide range of technologies to create new ways of gathering insight through real time surveys, AI powered web scraping tools, voice surveys, mobile apps, and digital qualitative tools.
He has integrated distillation and curation technologies into company workflows to drive efficiency improvements through video AI, linguistic technologies and automated report generation.
As a proven builder of businesses, he started his career at Kantar Millward Brown in the UK before heading to the US in the mid nineties and at the start of the new century, joined Hall & Partners, launching their Chicago office and helping scale the business prior to its sale to Omnicom. On his return to the UK in 2010 he built the CrowdLab mobile platform which he scaled and eventually sold to Dynata in 2020.
He joined the Board of Firefish in February this year when he leads on keeping the agency and their offer at the cutting edge of research innovation.

Minesh Parikh, Vice President, Kearney PERLab

Roy Robinson, Chief Product Officer, MentionMe

Chris Sinclair, Global Growth Officer, NIQ Bases
Chris leads the BASES global Speciality covering all aspects of Product development, from early blind prototype development, through to Concept-Product fit and pre-launch testing and forecasting.
His career started in Sensory Science, optimising product formulations using consumer and Sensory data, with R&D client teams. Before joining BASES in 2020, Chris led the Innovation practice at Ipsos in the US and EMEA.
His experience covers products from across the Global CPG space, helping clients achieve product superiority, and optimal Concept-Product Fit.
At BASES, Chris introduced new AI-driven solutions to identify new routes to creatively develop products; and is using LLM’s to create new Ideas and Concepts.
Having worked across all product categories, Chris brings a wealth of experience in developing and launching products that will delight consumers.

Prerit Souda, Director - Data Science & Strategic Insights, PSA Consultants
Data Science and Strategic Visionary instrumental in developing advanced data science, AI and data mining solutions to drive growth and cost efficiencies. Preriit’s career spans academic research and research firms such as TNS and Kantar where he worked with clients across Europe, China, Middle-East and North America.  Preriit works with Radius and clients across the world on strategically vital projects concerning data and insights. Prerit’s work has been presented globally, and has won several awards, including ESOMAR Best Paper (Global) 2017, MRS (Market Research Society UK), Movers and Shakers for Thought leadership 2018, GRIT 2019 Honoree, WPP Atticus 2015, 2016, Grit Future list 2019.

Phil Sutcliffe, Managing Partner, Nexxt Intelligence 
Phil Sutcliffe is Managing Partner at Nexxt Intelligence | inca. Nexxt Intelligence has been a leader in the application of generative AI for market research through the company’s suite of conversational AI capabilities. The company’s purpose is to use technology, especially the latest AI, to put the human at the centre, creating delightful experiences for research participants and amplifying the human voice to deliver deeper insight. Phil has presented widely on the topic of generative AI and market research over the last year – including on conference platforms and through webinars for IIEX, Esomar, ASC, GRBN, AURA and NewMR. Phil has over 30 years market research experience, mostly in senior roles at Kantar, before joining Nexxt Intelligence | inca two years ago.

Darren Till, Senior Researcher, Bulbshare