It was 11 am. My colleague woke me up. The congress evening gala after party had gone on until 5 am… and we hadn’t been the last to leave.
We checked out late. Luckily, the staff didn’t resent.
On a short walk over to the Maritim hotel, we discussed the last three days of the event. They had been colorful. On top of our minds, we had the conception of how visual the presentations had been. Except for a few, where a video was shown. And was it effective! You could feel the audience attention shifting. Almost nobody viewed their phone or laptop anymore, had they been using one. Of course, we knew videos are powerful when it comes to presenting, but it was very eye-opening to see them used in such a different way. We decided it was time to purchase a camcorder for us as well.
There were many good presentations, but my favorite revolved around the concept of having automated AI, mainly machine learning, assisted analysis on unstructured text data. We saw examples on how AI could be used to categorize open ended text questions or data from social media. Actually, there were quite some exhibitors, offering this kind of services. After a quick chat, it seemed that most offer full house analysis, maybe a little bit more than what we are looking for. It felt like nobody had a product/service that fits our needs 100 percent.
Best case scenario, we outsource parts of the research, or purchase tools, which handle very specific tasks, and design the architecture around these tools to get exactly the outcome we need. It is understandable that everybody wants to be insight provider, but for us, we would like to have the analysis and reporting for ourselves.
As for tips, I took some notes about services, that I came across, and that we need to get to know more. Here they are
- Cool Tool (eye tracking based on webcam)
- LivingLens (video / audio to text, translations, categorization)
- Askia (survey data analysis and reporting)
- MarketSight (data analysis software)
- Red Centre Ruby (end-to-end market research platform)
- Dalia (online surveys via mobile apps already used by respondents)
We reached the Maritim hotel. Even though we had missed the morning presentation of the last congress day, the best was yet to come. The last key note presentation was about the near future of technology-worth all the money. It gave very clear vision of where things are evolving and reinforced the strategy we had chosen for our business. If you have access to Esomar TV, I strongly recommend you watch the recording of Congress day 3. The presentation starts at 3:18:55.
Overall, it had been very fruitful four days. We got new ideas, got a glimpse of where the industry is at the moment, met colleagues and service providers. Now it’s time to recap and hopefully get new practices initiated. I will write more about the influence on the last blog.
