Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

For anyone who wasn’t sure (and judging by some of the posts I saw elsewhere linking back to yesterdays post, there were some), yesterdays “UN acquisition of Facebook.com” post was an April fools joke.I had started writing one which was more market research oriented, but it was tricky as I didn’t want to offend anyone and I was in a hurry to get down to the ARF Conference in NYC.

As far as research organizations/conferences go, from my post a couple days ago, you know that I’m not a particularly big fan of the ARF (in terms of good ROI). I also think it’s tacky to have speakers that pay to speak (if speakers have any interesting info to share then you should have to pay them), and senseless to have attendees of Webinars pay in this day and age of free media (the most unique thing about ARF Webinars). But since I hadn’t been to the ARF Congference in 2-3 years now, and because one of my colleagues Jesse Chen and I had to go to a lunch meeting with someone there from ComScore, so I thought it would be worth stopping in for a bit.

There are really only 2 reasons for me to go to the ARF. One is to see old colleagues (I only met three this year! Janice and Terence, both from Greenfield Online, and Jake from comScore), the other reason is to get a little ‘friendly’ competitive intelligence on what other research firms are doing (there wasn’t really much of that this year either). The reason is, and it wasn’t just the venue (Marriot Marquis does seem larger than the old Hilton), but there were definitely far fewer booths there. Not even TNS had a booth this year! Looks like TNS is just as savvy about conference ROI spend as we are, LOL.

There is a third reason someone might find the ARF useful. If a sizeable part of your business is from other market research firms. Anyway, will be interesting to see what Inside Research or RFL Communications will have to say about the value of this conference in the future?

The one company I did want to learn a bit more about this year was Peanut Labs. I was going to duck into their speaking session, but had a call I had to get back to the office for. When searching for their booth in the Expo I noticed they didn’t have one either.

I did finally get to put a face to a name I seem to run into frequently on Linkedin though. Dan Coates, co-founder at Survey U, a firm specializing on college sample. Dan apparently did have a booth and it was nice to talk to finally meet and talk to someone else who values this important demographic.

As for the ARF, I think there will be a few more years before I bother to drive into the City for one of their conferences again. That’s if they’re still around by that time…?

- Tom

PS
Below, a “Catch the Moment” picture, courtesy of e-Rewards.

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