Stagwell is tightening its grip on the fast-moving world of AI-driven market intelligence. The company has appointed industry veteran Jonathan Gardner as CEO of Harris Quest, the AI-powered research and brand management platform jointly driven by The Marketing Cloud and The Harris Poll. It’s a notable move—less about shuffling leadership, more about signaling where the future of enterprise-grade insights is heading.
And if the last few years have made one thing painfully clear for marketers and analysts alike, it’s this: real-time, trustworthy data is no longer optional. AI tools are multiplying, dashboards are crowding, and executives are demanding clarity faster than humans can analyze it. Harris Quest is Stagwell’s attempt to bridge that gap—and Gardner is now the one holding the blueprint.
An Industry Veteran Takes the Helm
Gardner steps into the role with over three decades of market research experience. He’s been deeply embedded at The Harris Poll for nearly ten years—most recently as COO—where he oversaw client delivery across one of the industry’s best-known research and consulting operations. Before that, he worked in senior leadership roles across The Marketing Cloud, Subject Matter, and Penn Schoen Berland.
If there’s someone who knows what’s wrong with traditional research workflows—and what AI can fix—it’s Gardner.
What Harris Quest Is—and Why It Matters Now
Harris Quest consolidates The Marketing Cloud’s AI capabilities with The Harris Poll’s decades of research expertise into a unified platform. The toolkit includes self-service brand tracking, survey automation, and real-time insight dashboards—essentially, a modernized stack for organizations that want to move faster without sacrificing data integrity.
The pitch isn’t subtle: AI without accuracy is dangerous; human analysis without speed is obsolete. Harris Quest tries to solve both.
And it’s launching at a moment when the broader insights industry is undergoing its own identity crisis. Generative AI has democratized survey creation. Predictive analytics is moving in-house. And research firms are scrambling to prove they still offer value that automated tools can’t replicate. Harris Quest is Stagwell’s strategic answer—part platform, part positioning statement.
Leadership Comments Hint at a Bigger Strategy
Elspeth Rollert, CEO of The Marketing Cloud, framed Gardner’s appointment as essential to scaling the platform:
Rollert emphasized Gardner’s “deep understanding of the marketplace and research tech,” noting that integrating AI and human-led analysis is critical for speed, accessibility, and quality.
John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll, echoed the sentiment—positioning Gardner as the person responsible for translating the Poll’s trusted research DNA into scalable, software-driven intelligence.
For his part, Gardner described Harris Quest as a convergence play: the rigor of a legacy research institution fused with the velocity of AI-native tools. It’s a perspective that tracks with the broader direction of MarTech and AdTech, where companies are blending automation with expert oversight to combat concerns around hallucinations, bias, and data compliance.
The Market Impact: A Platform Built for an AI-First Insights Economy
The appointment is more than a leadership announcement—it’s a signal of where Stagwell is placing its bets:
- Insight delivery is shifting from “projects” to always-on systems.
- AI-enabled research platforms are becoming table stakes, not experimental add-ons.
- Traditional pollsters must evolve or risk irrelevance in an algorithm-run world.
Harris Quest enters a competitive market, going head-to-head with Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey’s enterprise stack, Ipsos research platforms, and a growing wave of AI-native disruptors. But with Stagwell’s tech infrastructure and The Harris Poll’s brand equity, it enters with a head start.
What remains to be seen is how quickly enterprises will trust AI-powered insights—especially in highly regulated verticals where data integrity is non-negotiable. Gardner’s role, effectively, is to make that trust easier to win.
The Bigger Picture for AdTech and MarTech
In a landscape where marketers are increasingly judged by their ability to justify every dollar of spend, real-time intelligence is becoming the new competitive advantage. Platforms like Harris Quest support attribution modeling, brand lift analysis, and consumer sentiment tracking at a pace traditional systems can’t sustain.
For AdTechEdge readers, the takeaway is simple:
Stagwell is doubling down on AI-enabled research as a core differentiator—and Gardner’s appointment is the clearest sign yet that the future of insights will be hybrid: AI-powered, human-shaped, and relentlessly real-time.
