Dear Members, dear colleagues, dear Insight community, 

 

Buenos días, good morning, and a very warm welcome to Valencia. 

It is an honour to open our Annual Congress 2026, and on behalf of everyone at ESOMAR, thank you for being here, and thank you for the trust you place in your association year after year.  

 

Esomar  Annual Congress is not simply another event in a crowded calendar. It is the Congress. For decades it has been the place where our profession gathers — where knowledge is not merely presented but genuinely shared, where a method proven in one market finds its way into another, and it is where our relationships are formed and renewed: relationships that are deep, and long, and built on trust. The same trust we ask the world to place in o D ur work. That is what makes these days different. That is why we come. 

Standing here this morning, I am reminded of a simple truth about our organisation: ESOMAR is not an office, and it is not a library of codes and guidelines. It is its people. Everything we have built and we keep building day after day — our standards, our knowledge, our voice with regulators and policymakers around the world — rests on the willingness of professionals like you to give this association your time, your expertise and your commitment. 

We are, in these few days, one of the most international gatherings our profession has anywhere in the world. Client-side leaders and independent researchers. Global agencies and one-person consultancies. Technology founders, academics, national association colleagues, and people who joined this industry eighteen months ago and already see it differently than the rest of us do. Some of you have been coming here for twenty years and could find the coffee station blindfolded. Some of you arrived last night, alone, wondering whether you would find your place. To you especially: welcome. By tomorrow you will not be a stranger to anyone here. This community does not do distance well. 

 

We have called this 2026 edition Metamorphosis. It would have been easier to choose a gentler word. “Growth”. “Innovation”. “The future of insights”. We chose a harder one, deliberately. 

Because metamorphosis is not a caterpillar that grows a pair of wings and carries on as before. Inside the chrysalis, something far more radical happens: the caterpillar largely dissolves. Its old structure breaks down, and from a small cluster of cells that were there all along, an entirely new body is organised. Same creature. Same DNA. A completely different way of being alive. 

I suspect that description is familiar to many of you. 

 

Our profession is not simply improving. It is being reorganised. The ways in which people share their opinions have changed. Consumers have become citizens who ask what happens to their data; citizens have become consumers who expect a brand to hold a position, not just sell a product. Cultures shift faster than our segmentations can describe them. Organisations are restructuring around us. Brands are built and unbuilt in public, at a speed no annual tracker was designed to capture. And artificial intelligence has moved, in very few years, from a session at the back of the programme into every job description in this room. 

The pace is real, and I will not stand here and pretend it is comfortable. From the inside, transformation rarely looks like transformation. It looks like dissolution. It looks like losing the things we were good at. That feeling is not a sign that we are failing. It is a sign that we are in the chrysalis. 

 

And this is where Valencia earns its place in our story. 

A little under seventy years ago, this city was devastated by a flood. The river that had shaped Valencia for centuries turned against it. The city took an extraordinary decision: it moved the river. And then it faced the question that interests me most: what to do with the empty bed left behind, a long scar running straight through the centre. 

It could have become a motorway. Instead, Valencia turned it into a garden. Nine kilometres of parkland, sport, music, science and shade, curving through the middle of the city. What had been a threat became the place where the city breathes. And when this region was tested again by water more recently, we all saw the same instinct : neighbours in the streets with buckets and brooms, long before any institution could arrive. This city understands metamorphosis. It does not pretend the flood never happened. It plants a garden in the riverbed. 

That is the standard I would set for us this week: not to deny what is being swept away, but to build something living in the space that opens up. 

There is a second Valencian lesson I cannot resist. Every year, this city spends months building magnificent sculptures. And then, in a single night, burns them. It is called the cremà. But there is one detail I love: before the flames, the public votes to save a single figure. Just one. It is pardoned, and saved. 

So here is the question that matters most this week. As our profession burns down its old structures — and some of them should burn — what do we pardon from the flames? 

My answer, and I believe it is yours too, is trust. And the ethics that make trust possible. 

Trust is not sentiment. It is the load-bearing structure of everything we do. Trust is not an abstraction, and it is not new. In the language of the chrysalis, it is our imaginal cell — the part of us that must survive the dissolution, because everything new will be built out of it. 

That is what we protect.  

 

Let me turn now to what we intend to build. Because a profession in metamorphosis needs more than something to defend. It needs a direction. So please, allow me to tell you more about our ambition. 

In a world of increasing uncertainty and complexity, we are committed to empowering people, organisations and society by elevating the data and insight profession; leading an industry that shapes how the world understands itself. 

As digital and AI transformation redefine what is possible, we are determined to guide positive change: fostering innovation and simplifying our ecosystem to deliver the value, growth and seamless experiences that we all deserve. 

I would ask you to hear one phrase in particular: an industry that shapes how the world understands itself. That is a large claim, and we should be careful with large claims. But I believe it is an accurate one. That is our work. Very few professions can say that their output is, quite literally, society’s understanding of itself. 

And we have chosen to lead the transformation. Not to survive it. Not to observe it from a safe distance and report on it afterwards. To be out in front of it, shaping where it goes. That is a demanding commitment, and we do not intend it to remain a statement on a page.  

The last thing a butterfly does is move.  

So move, these next days. Sit next to someone you do not know. Go to the session that has nothing to do with your specialism. Disagree with a speaker, kindly. Ask the question you were not sure you were allowed to ask. Find the person whose work slightly intimidates you and introduce yourself. 

Dear colleagues, we did not come to Valencia to admire the change from a safe distance. We came to be part of it, and to shape it, together. 

Welcome to your Congress. Welcome to Valencia. Welcome to our metamorphosis. 

This is our direction. This is our ambition. This is ESOMAR. 

 

 Thank you.