CANNES — In one form or another, David Kenny’s career has been all about data, from the advertiser, agency and publisher perspective.
Now The Weather Company’s CEO and chairman, Kenny was previously a president at Akamai, a managing partner of VivaKi, and a founder of Digitas. In his first job at Bain, he learned from the company’s current chairman Orit Gadiesh not to rely on averages when trying to establish something about human behavior.
“It helped me really understand the importance of getting under the data and looking at precise segments and precise individual patterns,” Kenny says in an interview with Beet.TV recorded at Cannes last month.
In terms of his accomplishments, Kenny says he’s proud of a climate change campaign The Weather Company has recently undertaken. The company enlisted a group of influential people, including military leaders and conservative politicians and CEOs, to explain the urgency of the issue in short, declarative statements.
“We reach 200 million people a day,” he says, “and helping those people relate to climate change I think will make a difference in their actions.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.
Kenny was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.
