As clients demand clearer commercial returns and AI changes how insight is delivered, RED C managing director Ciara Reilly tells John McGee that understanding real people remains the industry’s most valuable work.
Ciara Reilly has read the obituaries for the market research industry many times over. Depending on who you listen to, the latest buzz killer is AI and its various applications across practically every industry.
“Every few years we hear of something that is going to wipe out the market research industry,” the managing director of RED C says.
“Businesses will always need to understand how real people behave, how they engage with brands and, ultimately, how they make decisions. That need isn’t going away,” she says emphatically.
It is a confident position from the head of an market research firm that has changed hands for the second time in five years.
Founded in 2003, RED C now sits within Bonnier, the Swedish family-owned media group with a significant presence across Northern Europe. Bonnier recently acquired a controlling stake The Business Post Group which bought RED C from its founders in 2021.
The firm now employs 80 people across Dublin and London, 57 of them client-facing researchers, and counts DAA, AIB, RTÉ, Allianz, Bord Bia, Coca-Cola, Tayto, An Post, Vodafone, Three and KPMG among its Irish clients. In the UK, it works with Disney, the BBC, the NBA, KP Snacks, Gatwick, Flutter and Southern Water.
The “C” in the name RED C, Reilly points out, stands for clarity. In an industry increasingly flooded with data, she believes clarity is a prized commodity.
Twenty years in the building
Reilly is an unusual leader in one respect: she has spent her entire career at the market research company she now leads, having joined in 2006, straight from completing a Master of Marketing Practice at UCD Smurfit Business School. She was also RED C’s first junior research executive when it was founded.
She says that when she was completing her Masters, she discovered the discipline and realised it “combined a lot of things I enjoy: understanding people, solving problems and using numbers to make better decisions.”
These days, 20 years working with the same business might be a rarity. Asked why she has stayed so long, she offers a simple answer.
“It really is a combination of RED C being a really good company to work for and the fact I’ve never really had the chance to get bored!”
What surprised her most on stepping up into the MD’s role was how little of the job is about the numbers. “The role is about people rather than anything else,” she says. “The commercial side matters, of course, but the biggest impact comes from supporting talented colleagues, building strong client relationships, and creating an environment where people feel valued and are given the opportunity to do their best work.”
Reilly took over from Sinéad Mooney, one of the co-founders of RED C, who stepped down in 2025 after more than 20 years at the helm. “She played a huge role in building the business and creating the culture that exists here today,” Reilly says. “While she is certainly missed around the office, I’m fortunate to have inherited a business with such strong foundations.”
The past year has brought other changes for RED C and the firm moved from Dublin’s north side to the IMI campus in Sandyford, where it sits alongside other companies within the wider Business Post Group. And there is the new owner. Reilly describes Bonnier as a natural fit, given its “strong background in content, data and insight”, and says the biggest prize is access to expertise across the group, “while continuing to operate as the independent, insight-led business that our clients know us for.”
Watching how other parts of the group embed AI into their workflows has been particularly useful. The arrangement, in her view, offers “the best of both worlds: the agility and entrepreneurial culture that has defined RED C for more than 20 years, combined with the backing and expertise of a much larger international group.”
The typing lesson
Reilly would rather AI did not dominate the conversation, but she concedes it cannot be avoided. “It is not just the biggest challenge facing our industry, it’s also the biggest opportunity,” she says.
“We can’t be afraid of AI or view it as something happening to us.”
She returns often to a remark from Joe Heneghan, chief executive of Revolut Europe, at a Marketing Society event earlier this year. “He made the point that computers didn’t eliminate secretaries; they made everyone learn how to type. That’s a simplification, but the principle feels very relevant today. I find myself coming back to that thought regularly when we’re reviewing processes within our business.”
Inside RED C, AI is already at work reviewing and analysing large volumes of data, coding open-ended survey responses, spotting patterns and speeding up reporting. The payoff, she argues, is in what researchers do with the time saved. “It allows our team to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time focusing on interpretation, strategic thinking and understanding the human stories behind the data. That’s where we have found that the real value lies.”
The WIN international research network has been “an exceptional advantage” in that adoption. “The goal isn’t to replace human thinking or expertise,” she says, “it’s to enhance it.”
There is also duty of care, she accepts. “There’s certainly a responsibility on research agencies to use AI thoughtfully, to ensure we retain the trust of our clients, but I see that more as an opportunity than a concern. Our job is to understand new technologies, test them rigorously and identify where they can genuinely create value for clients, while being transparent in their usage.”
Personas, yes. Synthetic data, with care
Nowhere is that care more evident than in the debate over synthetic respondents, one of the more contentious topics in the market research world. Reilly draws a firm line between AI personas, which she says “can be founded on high quality human data”, and synthetic data, which “is typically created purely from AI.”
RED C already offers the former. The personas are built on research it has conducted for a specific client, allowing the findings to live beyond a single survey or report. Rather than searching through tables, executives can question a persona and receive a text or audio answer “in a fraction of the time it used to take.”
The critical point is provenance.
“The persona isn’t inventing answers, it’s drawing on genuine research findings and respondent data to answer questions.”
On purely synthetic data, she is markedly more cautious. “We have found in testing that synthetic data is only as good as the underlying data that it is initially based on, that it degrades quickly and that it can only be used sparingly,” she says. The source, the time period it reflects and how widely it has been reused elsewhere are often unknown. “We firmly believe that research should be based on real people: their thoughts, feelings, experiences and behaviours. Synthetic data built without a solid foundation is particularly dangerous.”
The firm does use light forms of augmented data, applying AI to boost samples so clients can dig into hard-to-reach subgroups, but only where it is anchored in real responses and only in specific circumstances. “The strength of any AI solution will always depend on the quality of the human data that sits behind it,” she says.
From findings to decisions
If clients now have their own AI tools and more data than ever, then why do they still need market research? Reilly argues the shift broadens the conversation rather than changing it. “Their underlying needs remain the same. They still need to understand people, make better decisions and reduce uncertainty. What’s changing is the way those answers are found and delivered.”
Indeed, she contends that abundance has raised the price of clarity.
“The questions clients bring to us are increasingly strategic in nature: what does this mean, what matters most, and what should we do next?”
RED C’s role, she says, is to bring “an external perspective, deep expertise in human behaviour, and the ability to connect multiple sources of evidence into a coherent story.”
The briefs themselves have not changed dramatically. They still range from straightforward PR surveys to large-scale ideation and pricing projects. What has changed is how the work is used. “Increasingly, clients are looking for a partner who can help them make sense of what the findings mean for their business, rather than simply presenting the results,” she says. “The role it plays within organisations has become far more central to decision-making.”
Brand and advertising effectiveness remains RED C’s largest strand of work, alongside customer experience, pricing and polling, and Reilly describes the firm as probably one of Ireland’s largest qualitative practitioners, having conducted more than €1m of qualitative research a year.
Value, not volume
With marketing budgets seemingly always under scrutiny, the question is less whether clients buy more or less research and more what they get for it?
“The days of a research report sitting on a shelf and never being looked at again should be behind us,” she says. “Insight needs to have a real impact on the business.” That places the onus on agencies to ensure findings remain useful “long after the project has finished”, she says.
Clients aren’t just buying data; they’re investing in insight that can influence decisions and drive business impact.”
Nor is the demand for speed. “Rarely do we ever hear clients saying that they don’t need the answers next month, it is always yesterday!” AI has added to that pressure, she acknowledges, and the answer lies in having the right product suite and letting technology do the heavy lifting. RED C’s range runs from RED C Direct, its 24-hour turnaround ad-testing service, to RED Line, its omnibus, which delivers a sample of 1,000 in seven days.
Earning trust, one poll at a time
Polling is where market research meets public scrutiny most directly, and Reilly accepts there is more of it today than two decades ago. “In many ways, that’s healthy. People should ask questions about where data comes from and how conclusions are reached.”
The problem, she says, is that polls are judged on a single headline when “there is a huge amount of methodology, quality control and statistical rigour sitting behind them.” Her definition is precise:
“Good polling is not about predicting the future, it’s about accurately measuring public sentiment at a particular point in time.”
Her answer to any sceptics out there is transparency and a track record. “Trust is earned through consistency and accuracy over time.” She points to RED C’s performance at the last two general elections in Ireland, where its results came within an average error of 0.8%, which she describes as the most accurate of all polling conducted, including the exit poll.
The resilient consumer
So what should marketers know about the Irish consumer right now? Not what they might expect she says. “What stands out most is not consumer caution, but consumer resilience. Despite several years of uncertainty and disruption, Irish consumers have adapted remarkably well.”
The RED C Consumer Mood Monitor suggests that rather than cutting back across the board, consumers are becoming increasingly selective, a pattern the firm has also seen in the UK in its recently published Families at Home study.
“People are happy to invest in the moments and experiences that matter most, while making more considered choices elsewhere,” she says. “This creates a real opportunity for brands that can build trust and demonstrate genuine value and relevance in those high-priority moments.”
Her parting advice to Irish marketers is about timing. “Too often, research is brought in at the end of the process to validate a decision that’s already been made,” she says. “The real value of insight lies much earlier, helping organisations challenge assumptions, uncover opportunities, explore different paths and make smarter decisions with greater confidence before significant investments are made.”
Decisions, she insists, should “start with the consumer rather than with what the business happens to deliver.” It is, in the end, the clarity that the “C” in RED C stands for.
