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Ipsos is a market research company that runs surveys and analyzes data to tell companies, governments and others what people think and why.
Ipsos is a company that sells answers to a deceptively simple question: what are people actually thinking? Companies want to know if a new ad works, politicians want to know what voters worry about, and brands want to know why customers pick one product over another. Ipsos goes out and asks them — through polls, surveys, online panels, interviews, and increasingly by tracking behavior and scraping meaning from huge piles of data — then turns those answers into reports and advice clients pay for.
The clients are organizations, not everyday people. Big consumer brands hire Ipsos to test products and measure advertising, media companies use it to understand audiences, and governments and public bodies commission it to study public opinion, health, and social trends. Ipsos runs this work across dozens of countries, which matters because a multinational client wants one research partner that can ask the same question in Tokyo, São Paulo, and Paris and hand back comparable numbers. The pitch to clients is straightforward: you can guess what your customers think, or you can pay us to actually find out. Its main rivals are the other big global research groups, like Nielsen in audience measurement and the big advertising-held research arms such as Kantar. The business is steady rather than glamorous — research budgets are among the first things companies trim when times get tough, so Ipsos's revenue tends to rise and fall with the wider economy. It has spent years shifting from old-fashioned paper and phone surveys toward digital data collection and analytics, which is cheaper to run and lets it sell faster, more frequent insights.
Ipsos was founded in Paris in 1975 by Didier Truchot, a researcher who started with a small French firm and grew it through decades of acquisitions into one of the world's largest research groups. It has been listed on Euronext Paris since 1999 and remains headquartered in the city where it began. The company has used its cash to keep buying smaller research firms and to pay shareholders a dividend, and founder Truchot stayed closely involved for decades — a sign of a business built patiently, one survey at a time.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026