Congress Day 2…

By Adam Warner @keenasmustard

Well, it’s day 2 of the ESOMAR Congress here in Dublin and after an obviously very quiet night where I certainly didn’t partake in a few Guinness’s, and definitely didn’t discover that it does taste different in Ireland. I, of course, was unequivocally on time this morning to start my day of blogging for RW Connect.

Today I was assigned room 2 (until after lunch where room 1 and 2 united for the afternoon of keynotes). It started extremely strongly with Annaelies and Katia of InSites Consulting kicking off the Future is Now thread. It was your usual InSites Consulting presentation and there’s a reason they pop up at every event, great content paired with dynamic presenting and beautiful slides. I do hope, however, we have managed to shorten those surveys by 2020! This was not the first time that shortening surveys have been mentioned this week, and I find it incredible that we still need to talk about this aspect of survey design at conferences. But I’ll cover that in more depth in my full report later this week.

Following on from InSites was more on the 2020Insight project. Although I am fascinated by this trend towards consumer centric companies and behaviours, I find myself unengaged with the study, perhaps because both myself and my MD dropped out of the insanely long and laborious survey we were sent for it a few months prior to Congress (actually perhaps we do need to continue to talk about survey length). It could also be because I’m fairly dubious as to some of the methodology. But that could easily be because I missed the explanation of that. I’ll endeavour to explore that later this week.

But the first session did set my theme of today. Many years ago Annelies of InSites Consulting was the first winner of ESOMAR’s Young Research Of the Year Award, and for room 2 this morning it certainly set the scene.

Next up, the Researching a Career initiative presented their findings of an industry survey that looked at recruitment and retention in the industry. It’s a great initiative, and something we wholeheartedly support at Mustard. In fact we have also been working with Liz Norman and Caroline Bates and presented our own career infographic at the Researching a Career stand in the exhibition hall – you can check it out here – http://www.mustardmarketing.com/career-map/

It was great to hear the positives from the survey, we are an industry that, on the whole, loves what we do. But the negatives are clear and this survey does provide insights as to how we can make it more attractive to new recruits and improve retention. It was also a pleasure to listen to the likes of Kristin Luck, Chris Wallbridge and Matt Taylor give their thoughts on the issues and solutions.

It’s obvious a key challenge for the industry, which is why it saddened me somewhat to see such a low turnout for the Young Researcher Award presentations. These guys are very engaged young researchers and need to be supported and encouraged. And they certainly should be, as for me their presentations have been some of the stand out content of the entire Congress. Dynamic speakers and some incredible research. This year’s winner Arindam Mohanty was the deserved winner with an incredible piece of qual research on India’s train system, fascinating stuff. I dearly hope that ESOMAR does all it can to spread the work of these 3 researchers to as wide an audience as possible.

This day’s update is drawing to a close, but needless to say Dave McCaughan and Vanessa Oshima’s final presentation in room 2 was, as always, incredibly insightful, as should be expected from two such high energy experienced presenters.

The theme of industry youth concluded after lunch with the keynote interview with 15 year old programming prodigy Jordan Casey. Jordan was also a keynote at least year’s Congress and it was good to see him again on his home turf, although it would have been good to see someone new this year. But he does seem to have quite the effect on people, a very likeable chap with an easy charm that can be quite inspiring. Anyone that can cause an almost childlike excitement in a certain association DG has a bright future.

Adam Warner is one of three RWC bloggers, reporting straight from Congress 2015 onsite.

Adam Warner is Communications Manager at Keen as Mustard.