By Adam Warner @keenasmustard
Well it’s that time of the year again, the conference season starts again after the summer break and here we are at one of the major events of the of the year, ESOMAR Congress.
This year in Dublin, and a good choice it is, conceptually reflective of the market research industry itself; friendly, with a strong sense of community, home to some ground breaking technologies from some of the biggest brands in the world, but also beset with financial issues in recent times and a need to establish value beyond the monetary.
Today I’m joined in the blogging by two very talented researchers David Pritchard and Danielle Todd. My background, however is in marketing and although I’ve spent the last 8 years in the research industry, hopefully I can provide a marketers perspective on the Congress.
The theme for this year’s event is the stereotypically nebulous idea of “Revelation” and I hoped that the ESOMAR team would be able to live up to the lofty notion.
Well, it was a bit of a slow start. The opening keynote, Susan Hayes Cullerton didn’t particularly resonate with me. Although her enthusiasm for the research industry was commendable, if you praise anything as relentlessly as she did, it ends up seeming a bit forced, even patronising.
This was followed by a “fire side chat” with BV Pradeep and Stan Sthanunathan too extremely well respected researchers and stalwart Congress faces talking about their work at Unilever, it was an interesting presentation concept, but again I felt I was lacking in any revelations.
After lunch, however, the content picked up. I was assigned to room 1 for the afternoon, which started with the Business Impact thread. As a marketer this was right down my street. This is the type of research that can really promote the value of the industry to marketing and advertising teams. In particular the first session with Jon Kearon of BrainJuicer and Tom Malleschitz, CMO of Three, was a revelatory journey exploring the power of emotions in advertisements without any USPs, some bold moves on the part of the marketing team at Three and a refreshingly ‘warts and all’ portrayal.
The other highlight within the thread was the agency/client counselling session of Point Blank International’s Christophe Welter and Bord Bia’s Helen King. It was fantastically prepared presentation, and it’s great to see presenters really think about the theatrics of their staging. It is also great to hear some reaching questions asked abut the agency-client relationship, something that gets a lot of rhetoric, but very little dialogue. What’s more, the guys managed to come away with some key practical takeaways that could help any agency improve their relationships with clients. I heartily recommend accessing the paper if you get the chance.
The afternoon continued with some more great sessions at the “Inspiring Methodologies from the Fringe” thread in room 1. I’m a sucker for research on research, so it was quite buzzy for me to listen to Ludovic Depoortere from Haystack and Sjoerd Koornstra of Heineken run through a project that proved that blind tasting in controlled environments missed a huge part of the picture in product testing for the beer giant.
The afternoon finished strongly with the “Media and the Role of Screens” session in room 1. Which was surprisingly interesting. In fact, all 3 presentations kept me pretty hooked, including some great work by Channel 4 and COG research on VOD advertisements, through to some fascinating work from Facebook about coming of age on digital devices. It’s hard to believe that young teens nowadays are never without touch screens and multiple digital devices.
I’ll be running through these sessions in more detail in my full Congress event report. But today I can certainly say that despite the start didn’t resonate with me, we finished very strongly this afternoon in room 1 and I’m already looking forward to tomorrow. But now it’s time for a few drinks and some networking with the rest of the industry.
Adam Warner is one of three RWC bloggers, reporting straight from Congress 2015 onsite.
Adam Warner is Communications Manager at Keen as Mustard.
