Chris Forrest

Chris started his career in 1982 as a qualitative researcher In 1986 he joined Ogilvy&Mather's Planning Department. He worked on many new business pitches and planned on Ford of Europe. Chris was promoted to the board of O&M in 1989, making him their youngest Board Director.Having been a success at a Blue Chip agency he yearned for something more creative and in 1991 he joined DFGW as Planning Director. His innovative brand strategy for the launch of Daewoo Cars in the UK was widely praised and won him success at both the APG Creative Planning Awards and the IPA Effectiveness Awards.

In 2001 Chris teamed up with Peter Dann and Lucy Banister to form ‘The Nursery Research and Planning’ which had a turnover of £3m last year. It specialises in creative development research for advertising and brand communications, increasingly on an international scale.

Chris is a prolific conference and training course speaker. He taught Advertising Strategy at the ‘Market Research Society Summer School’ for 11 years and Quantitative Data at ‘IPA 2’ for 9. He’s written chapters for textbooks on both quantitative (‘Excellence in Advertising’ IPA) and qualitative research (‘Qualitative Research in Context’ AQR).

His 2005 MRS paper on the implications of brain science was short-listed for both Best Presented and Best New Thinking awards. He won the research section of the prestigious APG ‘battle of big thinking’ in 2006. In 2008 He spoke at both the AQR worldwide qualitative research conference in Barcelona and the ESOMAR conference in Istanbul.

Chris runs an annual conference for WARC on consumers and advertising. He is also ‘module editor’ for the IPA Diploma’s People and Brands module, putting together a list of key texts, setting and marking essays for ‘Advertising’s in-house MBA’. He is also a judge on the IPA Effectiveness Awards.