Both the award and the new category recognising media research will be sponsored by Kantar Millward Brown. Its head of marketing, Jane Bloomfield, said: "Understanding brands and advertising is our lifeblood. It is a great honour to sponsor the new Jeremy Bullmore Award and the media category. Creativity in both advertising and media are critical for clients to grow great brands.”

Bullmore said: "Advertising owes two great debts to research. First, as every Mad Man knows, research can be held solely responsible for all bad advertising, having strangled all the original ideas at birth!

"And second, as the rest of us know, if you use it properly – if you don’t just read it but you mine it, you challenge it, you hold it up to the light and smell it – research can liberate, illuminate and bring credence to the wildest of hypotheses."

The MRS Awards and Research Live Awards 2017 open for entries on 2 May with a deadline of 6 July.