June 17, 2025
Wayne Levings, CEO – Americas Kantar
How To Uber Yourself Before You Get Kodaked, Wayne Levings – CEO Americas Kantar
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Being the biggest leader in your industry sector doesn’t guarantee the future anymore. These days it can be quite the opposite, as we continue to witness big-dog leaders being dethroned by the next generation of agile tech-enabled competitors.
On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Show we have a sit down with Wayne Levings, a CEO, Chief Client Officer, and Executive Committee Member at Kantar, to learn from one of the biggest reboots of our decade.
For Kantar, the struggle over the last decade has been real, as they have been through multiple reboots, adapting to the global power shifts in the market. The first reboot came with a mandate to breakup some of the pieces and spinout the company from the WPP Mothership through a partnership with Bain Capital. Now on their own, Kantar is a $3.5B marketing data and analytics powerhouse with 25,000 employees operating in 100 countries. With massive backing from Bain they have an opportunity to invest in next-gen areas, like AI and automation, and seize what’s next. But it won’t be easy to fight back and disrupt the disruptive disruptors.
Watch or listen as we unpack this exciting reboot in progress, as they search for the perfect balance of AI and human-driven data—with a sneak peek into the future in this frothy hyper-competitive market being disrupted by AI.
From Legacy To Leading Edge
One of the reasons that Kantar was able to find success, outside of its scale, is because they have a vast history of expertise that is being amplified more and more by technology. One reason they are able to do this is because, as Wayne puts its, Kantar has “Millions and millions, billions of data points that we have built up over the years” and just having that data alone makes Kantar incredibly valuable. Then, with all those billions of data points, Kantar has been able to train AI models in every aspect of marketing and analytics to make it into a tool that their customers can use to become more successful, and their own employees can use to be more efficient. This is all opposed to Kantars younger competitors who are using “synthetic data” or even social media data, which isn’t always that trustworthy. Ah, the disruptors.
A Blueprint For Brand Growth
One of the ways Wayne has used Kantar’s vast database of knowledge is by creating a Blueprint for Brand Growth. This is a framework that is the product of years of successes, and failures, in their industry, that can be used to help brands grow. The blueprint focuses on three key metrics which are “how meaningful is your brand? How different is it? And what level of salience it has?” This blueprint is a science-backed approach and is being used by many of the world’s top advisors as they integrate the blueprint into their own strategies.
Lessons For Future CEO’s
Since Wayne and Kantar have built a business around being the best advice givers out there, we wanted to get some of that advice for our leaders and listeners out there. One of the pieces of advice that Wayne gave to use was “what we know is that strong brands, no matter where you are, whether you’re a consumer business, whether you’re a B2B business, whatever you are, strong brands make a huge difference.” Wayne goes on to say that if you start to disinvest in your brand, the cost and time it will take to build it back up afterwards will be greater than if you constantly invest in that brand. So Waynes advice? “Continue to invest in your brand.” If it is something you want to see grow and move forward, don’t falter when times become uncertain.
