Ad Diagnostics is a series of interviews with some of the biggest thinkers in London’s advertising and media research industry. My mission is to explore different methodologies in evaluating how effective a piece of TV or video creative is.

For this first interview, Ian Forrester, insight director at Unruly, shared his views. Unruly is a tech company with an approach that makes videos go viral and that brings brands and consumers together through social video.

In my insight role at media and communications agency Universal McCann much of my time is spent evaluating how effectively an advertising campaign has performed, and on developing recommendations for future marketing initiatives. Judging a campaign’s merits is often a process of establishing how effectively a campaign’s communication channels performed at reaching its target consumer and at landing the campaign’s messages.

There are many established survey techniques but these Ad Diagnostic interviews are aimed at helping to crack the methodological riddle of how to robustly identify a great ad.

Michael Brown is senior insight manager, UM London