Zappi's 2025 year in insights

2025: The year Connected Insights became non-negotiable

Brands are making x10 more decisions than they did just three years ago — thousands every month, across more channels, markets, and consumer moments. But decision velocity has outpaced insight velocity. Most research systems simply weren't built for the speed at which modern businesses operate.

In 2025, that started to shift.

Connected insights began moving from nice-to-have to non-negotiable as more of the world’s leading brands worked to bring consumer understanding into the flow of daily decisions.

This transformation is still underway. The gap isn’t closed yet.

But 2025 made one thing clear: brands that stay continuously connected to consumers are the ones that win.

Here’s how the year unfolded, and how Zappi helped accelerate the shift.

This year, Zappi added customers with more than $160B in combined revenue, across 39 major global and US brands.

Zappi now partners with more than half of the Fortune 500 CPG brands, including PepsiCo, Mars, Colgate-Palmolive, and Coca-Cola, across 250+ business units.

Across the platform in 2025, Zappi customers:

• Tested 90K ideas

• Engaged 8M consumers in 62 countries

• Powered more than 273 concepts created by our AI agents, with 766 concept iterations

And together, they surpassed 1.2 billion consumer data points, fueling one of the most robust and continuously growing insight ecosystems in the world.

These aren’t just numbers.

They’re signals of trust—and evidence that brands are moving toward continuous, consumer-driven decision velocity, fueled by connected insights.

Earlier this year, Forrester's Total Economic Impact study confirmed what many of our customers already knew: connected insights lead to better business outcomes.

According to Forrester, Zappi delivers 243% ROI with payback in under six months.

These results reflect what happens when the voice of the consumer informs decisions across advertising, innovation, and brand building. Brands reduce risk. They move faster. They launch with confidence. And ultimately, they win with consumers.

How we evolved the Zappi platform in 2025

As brands accelerate decision-making, they need a connected insights platform to keep up.

In 2025, we focused our platform evolution on one goal: closing the gap between decisions and insight.

This year, we shipped more than 150 product releases focused on making insights faster, easier, and more connected. We added AI-enhanced workflows that accelerate how teams work, gave teams flexibility for ad hoc testing, and made it simple to connect testing data together—turning fragmented insights into a unique, continuously growing data asset that gets smarter with every project. And we launched an entirely new product pillar onto the platform: brand tracking, bringing continuous brand health measurement into the connected insights ecosystem.

Yes, speed matters. But it's not just about velocity. 

It's about delivering breakthroughs that keep you ahead of the rhythm of modern decision-making. Every release moved the industry closer to a world where consumer insight is connected, continuous, and instantly accessible — matching the rhythm of how brands work today.

Modern marketers need brand health insights that keep pace with how they work today—continuous, accessible, and built for agility. But for too many teams, brand tracking has been out of reach due to cost and complexity.

That's why we launched the Zappi Brand Health Tracker— with continuous data collection and regular reporting updates, all at a price point that finally opens up brand tracking to more teams across more markets.

With Zappi Brand Health Tracker, brands can:

• Monitor brand performance with continuous data collection and regular updates

• Connect brand health to advertising and innovation impact

• Identify early signals and address issues before they become costly

• Access high-quality tracking at a fraction of traditional costs, enabling democratized brand measurement across markets and teams

This isn’t just a new tracker.

It's brand health measurement designed for how modern marketing teams actually operate—and priced so more teams can finally benefit from it.

Most AI in marketing is built on generic language models —disconnected from real consumer behavior and what actually works with your audiences.

This year, we launched AI Concept Creation Agents that transform how brands ideate. These agents leverage your own concept testing data—learning from what's worked before and why—to generate winning, test-ready concepts in minutes. For brands without their own data yet, our agents tap into Zappi's category normative data to jumpstart ideation with proven category trends.

The agents create a continuous learning loop within your innovation workflow: concepts you generate get tested through Activate It, and those results feed back to make your next round of ideation even smarter. Every test builds your proprietary data asset, giving you a competitive edge as everyone else uses the same generic AI models.

In practice, our customers generated concepts 30× faster at 20× lower resource costs, with 90% of AI-created concepts rated as highly distinctive by consumers

This isn't AI for AI's sake. It's AI that learns from your consumers, accelerates your innovation process, and helps you test and learn at the speed your business demands.

At the second edition of our Connected Insights Imperative report, we unveiled Level 4 of the Connected Insights Framework —  the highest stage of consumer-centric maturity and the clearest articulation yet of the system Zappi is building.

But the industry isn’t there yet:

• Only 6% of companies operate at Level 4

• Data fragmentation is the #1 barrier blocking progress

• AI investment is rising, but disconnected insight systems prevent organizations from capturing full value

The report took center stage at our Connected Insights Conference in Chicago where dozens of insights leaders from brands like McDonald's, Mars, T-Mobile, Kraft Heinz, Rust-Oleum and Bel Group came together to explore how leading brands are embedding connected insights into their operating systems, operationalizing continuous learning across creative and innovation, and evolving insights teams from project managers to strategic decision partners.

Speakers shared honest, practical stories of transformation — giving the industry a clear blueprint for what’s possible when insights become truly connected.

Elevating our footprint in the industry

Super Bowl and Cannes: Taking the stage at marketing's biggest moments

Every year, the world’s most important marketing conversations unfold at Cannes Lions and during the Super Bowl. In 2025, Zappi was right at the center of both.

At Cannes Lions, we partnered with Insights Lighthouse, Brand Innovators, Adweek, Vayner Media, and The Female Quotient to bring connected insights to the center of creativity. We took the stage alongside PepsiCo, Visa, L'Oréal, L'Occitane Group and many more to show how consumer data fuels breakthrough work. In the lead-up to Cannes, we launched our annual State of Creative Effectiveness report.

During the Super Bowl, we teamed up with Adweek for a major content takeover that reached millions during the biggest advertising moment of the year. And on stage with  PepsiCo, Spotify, Uber and MSC Cruises, we proved what winning brands already know: the ads that dominate the Super Bowl are made by testing, learning, and co-creating with consumers.

These tentpole moments helped put consumer insights where they deserve to be: at the center of the conversations shaping modern marketing.

Also this year, we relaunched our Inside Insights podcast with a clear mission: Bridge the gap between marketing and insights leaders.

It worked.

The show broke into the top 10 marketing podcasts in the U.S. and top 20 business podcasts nationwide, drawing leaders from PepsiCo, Unilever, the NFL, and more. Together, they unpacked how they navigate AI, build consumer-centric organizations and drive meaningful business outcomes.

This mission matters because the partnership between marketing and insights is critical to modern brand success. Our Connected Insights Imperative report confirms it: brands operating at higher levels of connected insights maturity report significantly stronger relationships between marketing and insights teams—proving that when insights become truly connected, they don't just inform better decisions, they transform how teams work together.

We were honored to win the 2025 ASC/MRS Award for Best Technology Innovation—a recognition that reflects how far our platform has come.

A decade ago, as Intellection Software, we won this same award for building the world’s first agile research platform  In 2025, we were recognized again—this time for building agentic AI designed to help brands win with consumers.

More than an accolade, it reflects a meaningful shift in how insights work. We’re grateful to the Market Research Society, the Association of Survey Computing, and, most importantly, our customers — who push us to build better tools, move faster, and stay bold.

We don't just grow fast. We grow right.

This year, we renewed our B Corp certification, reaffirming our commitment to building a company that operates as a force for good. We also became a Disability Confident Leader in the UK, strengthening our focus on inclusivity and access.

We continued investing in the next generation of insights leaders through education initiatives—running workshops at the Camden/Google AI Campus, hosting student internships, and supporting work experience programs. 

Because building the future of insights requires investing in the people who will shape it.

Brands face a new reality:

• More decisions

• Faster cycles

• Shifting consumer behavior

• AI embedded across every workflow

Winning brands aren’t trying to slow this down.

They’re redesigning how they work — embedding consumer insight into every decision, using AI to accelerate judgment, and building systems that keep pace with their consumers.

This is the direction the industry is headed..

And it’s the future Zappi is helping create: a world where consumer insights are continuous, connected, and instantly available — so teams can win with consumers.

To our customers: thank you for your partnership and trust.

To our team: thank you for the ambition, creativity, and relentless drive that made 2025 a defining year.

Here’s to an even bolder 2026 — and to helping more brands win with consumers.