David Kenny was appointed Chief Executive Officer at Nielsen in November 2018.
Kenny has spent his career in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, especially focused on the retail, marketing, and media industries. He has a deep and holistic understanding of media and advertisers and how best to serve them, and he has been a long time Nielsen customer and partner. Kenny has a proven track record of implementing growth strategies, overseeing strategic transactions and creating value for stakeholders.
Most recently, Kenny served as Senior Vice President of Cognitive Solutions at IBM. There, he oversaw IBM’s artificial intelligence initiatives, using machine learning to support enterprise customers across a large number of verticals, including healthcare, financial services, retail, and media. Prior to that, he was Chairman and Chief Executive of The Weather Company, which was acquired by IBM.
He served as President of Akamai, a cloud platform technology company; Managing Partner of VivaKi, a media company; and co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Digitas, Inc.
Currently, David serves on the Board of Directors for Best Buy and Teach for America.
David received his bachelor’s degree in industrial administration from the GM Institute (now Kettering University) and holds a Masters of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.
Member since 2019