David Kenny is the executive chairman at Nielsen and previously assumed the roles of chief executive officer and chief diversity officer.

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 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, Kenny was chairman and chief executive of The Weather Company, which was subsequently acquired by IBM. He previously served as president of Akamai, a cloud platform technology company, and managing partner of VivaKi, a media company. Earlier, he was co-founder and chief executive officer of Digitas, Inc., where he oversaw significant value creation and ultimately the sale of the company to Publicis. 

Currently, David serves on the board of directors for Best Buy and Teach for America. Throughout his career, Kenny has been an advocate of diversity as a fundamental component of an organization’s culture. David received his bachelor’s degree in industrial administration from the GM Institute (now Kettering University) and holds a Master's of business administration from Harvard Business School.