Making video viral

x Sponsored content on Research Live and in Impact magazine is editorially independent.
Find out more about advertising and sponsorship.

Considering the prominence of cute animals in online video, it feels entirely fitting that my interview with Ian Forrester should be conducted with his adorable pug, Lola, snoozing contentedly at my feet. Lola is a regular presence at video-ad tech company Unruly, where she is fussed over like canine royalty. 

Like many a tech start-up, Unruly is based in trendy east London. Its head office – in a side street off vibrant, multicultural Brick Lane – is exactly what you would expect of a young company of this kind: artfully exposed, post-industrial brickwork; clean lines; quirky neon wall signs; indoor bike racks; pug-friendly; and screens – plenty of screens. 

Even a visitor with no idea what Unruly was about would quickly glean a sense of it. But those unaware of the business have become thinner on the ground recently. In September 2015, the company – which was formed in 2006 and became a constituent of the Tech City Future Fifty – hit the headlines when it was snapped up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in a deal worth an initial £58m in cash. A further £56m is potentially payable, subject to meeting certain performance targets. 

Unruly’s founders – Sarah Wood, Scott Button and Matt Cooke – have all agreed to stay on, and now report to high-profile News UK chief executive Rebekah Brooks who recently returned to the media group after a well-documented interlude. The rationale for the purchase is clear: Brooks articulates it as the need to “accelerate our growth in this digital age”. 

So what has News Corp got for its money? For a start, Unruly offers a sophisticated video-distribution platform and styles itself as the leading programmatic platform for social video sharing. It is a pioneer in tracking video sharing and delivering verifiable video views via paid media across mobile, desktop and tablet devices. Moreover, it has developed a clever tool for predicting the potential for video ads to go viral.

Nine out of every 10 brands in the AdAge Top 100 have turned to Unruly at some point and, although the company is coy about naming clients, Adidas, Dove, T-Mobile, Evian and Renault are among its top-tier advertisers. In the months ahead, News Corp’s business units worldwide will be offering Unruly products to advertising and agency partners, as it significantly steps up its premium video and mobile inventory, and enhances its content-marketing proposition. The first fruits of this came in late October, with the launch of a new format for injecting video ads into editorial content.

Forrester, as insight director, has a key part to play in helping Unruly’s new owner reap a worthwhile return on its investment. “From my point of view, there is a tonne of opportunity working with the News UK guys,” he says. “We are working out where we can add most value –  first, educating News people on social video, viral video, and how to use video. We are running some masterclasses, basically embedding our knowledge in the parent company. Then, second, we will look at advertisers and how we can deliver more value for them. 

“Some things are still up in the air, but, essentially, there will be some interesting cross-media analysis. Take a campaign over TV, print and online – how different demographics behave online versus their print consumption. Potentially, it opens up a lot of doors for us from an insight perspective. We have big, established insight teams we can work with, with their own datasets and expertise. I feel we can bring all those together and do something pretty groundbreaking.” 

Ian Forrester

Forrester joined Unruly in 2012, after an approach from a headhunter. Up to that point, his career had been spent with big corporates in the FMCG and home-entertainment markets. Moving to a start-up at first struck him as a “leftfield choice”, but the opportunity to create an insight function from scratch was too tempting to pass up.

“When I met some of the team, I was massively impressed by the level of knowledge, the data, and the opportunities they had at Unruly. They had dabbled in various bits of insight, working with agencies. But, immediately, I recognised that the opportunity here was just vast because of the data we have and the position we have with clients. The fact that we can work across verticals, across territories – it was a huge opportunity.”

In the three years since Forrester came on board, Unruly has almost doubled in size. It now employs around 200 people across 15 offices and has regional headquarters in London, New York and Singapore. In October 2015, it revealed that it was opening an office in Tokyo. The announcement was made during Boris Johnson’s official trade mission to Japan, with the Mayor of London praising Unruly as “one of the great success stories” of the UK capital’s tech community.

Forrester is in the midst of “a Japanese deep dive” – looking at the sharing and viewing patterns of online video in Japan. He will present his findings in support of the new office launch. 

Having been active for the best part of a decade, Unruly has tracked around two trillion video streams to date. It’s a huge dataset and there’s no doubt Forrester is proud and enthusiastic about the possibilities. “We have got this incredibly rich data source – which is really awesome from our point of view. It also gets us into conversations with brands at quite a strategic level. We are seen to be at the forefront of social video. So they think: ‘These guys don’t just distribute social content, they understand content. They understand what makes great content’.”

Forrester is keen on collaborations with academia, which he feels many big businesses neglect to their detriment. Unruly works on research projects with universities around the world and has recently added Keio University, in Japan, to a list of partners that includes academics at Wharton business school, at the University of Pennsylvania; Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, US, and several leading European institutions. Unruly co-founder Sarah Wood is also an associate lecturer at the University of Cambridge, delivering the online video module of the screen cultures MPhil course.

“Ian is great at delivering the research story to the client,” says Dr Karen Nelson-Field, director of the Centre for Digital Video Intelligence at the University of South Australia Business School. “He understands the patterns inherent in the Unruly data and can translate that to insight well.”

Nelson-Field, author of Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing, is a world authority on viral video and has worked on projects with Forrester for several years. It was her work that provided the starting point for ShareRank (see box). 

“Unruly incorporated my emotions research and my early methodology into ShareRank,” Nelson-Field explains. “It has come a long way; the algorithm is tighter as Unruly has tested it at scale, and it has since incorporated other metrics that improve the predictive power even further.”

Forrester says that the huge dataset at Unruly’s disposal makes it easy for the business to foster relations with academics. “We can say: ‘What hypothesis do you want to test? OK, you want to look at these things, we have X, Y, Z data that could be useful for you. Here’s the data, let’s work in collaboration – we can help feed into your analysis’.”

Subsequently, Unruly holds roundtables once research is complete. Clients are invited in to talk about the results. If key strands of insight stand out, Forrester looks at how they can be incorporated into any of the company’s products. If “something cool, new and interesting” comes to light, Forrester and his team make sure recommendations are passed on to clients. “In my experience, that’s quite different to how corporates work,” he says. 

This is consistent with the way the business is developing. Unruly very much remains a video-distribution company, guaranteeing viewability to 1.35bn monthly unique users across mobile, tablet and desktop devices. Its insight into what is trending and why, however, means it is increasingly getting involved in strategic conversations with advertisers and their agencies early in the creative process. 

Unruly is currently talking to several global brands – in the throes of repositioning themselves – that are exploring how content can help them do that effectively. 

The Unruly team

But aren’t creatives resistant to – or even appalled by – the notion of applying algorithms to their work? Actually, Forrester retorts, the opposite is often true. By looking at emotional responses, ShareRank chimes with what creative teams try to achieve. “In some cases, the client asks to tone down a video or says we can’t go to a certain creative place – but then our methodology proves that, in order for that video to be successful, they need to turn those emotional responses up to a nine or a 10. That gives them creative licence to go out and actually tell stories, as opposed to watering down their work or focusing on less effective things. Most creative people I have spoken to get it, and like it.” 

Unruly works with a roster of agencies, including eMarketer, comScore and Decipher Media Research. It buys reach data from comScore, while Decipher runs brand studies. There is also an ongoing working relationship with Neuromarketing Labs, a neuroscience specialist in Germany that has helped Unruly develop an electroencephalogram (EEG) brain scan add-on for ShareRank, designed to pinpoint the precise nature of an emotional response to a video.

Of course, to respond to a video, consumers must see it first. Which brings us to the digital elephant in the room – the rise of adblocking. Forrester concedes it is a “big problem” that needs facing. In September 2015, Unruly launched a hi-tech Future Video Lab – initially in New York, with another subsequently opening in London – to help advertisers create video that people want to watch and share, rather than avoid.

“We have done tonnes of work around what people expect from content,” says Forrester. “Creating great content is really important because, with fewer opportunities to speak to consumers, you have to make sure you have your brand message absolutely nailed and that you are getting that intense emotional response from consumers.”

Finally, I ask Forrester if he has a favourite video ad. He tells me it changes, but his current number one is Purina Puppyhood, an endearing and amusing video of a man adopting a puppy, in which the puppy food is cleverly integral to the story. As we watch the video on Forrester’s laptop, Lola remains asleep – but I suspect she’d like it too.