Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

NAFC (#$%*) - What are your rules for attending/speaking at conferences?

This weeks Advertising Age polled readers on whether or not marketing conferences have become irrelevant, 61% of readers said yes.

A few interesting reader comments were included:

Peggy Kennedy, FRCH Design: “Same shit, different PowerPoint”

Matt Johnson, Intermedia Outdoors: “What’s presented at conferences is nothing different than what is delivered in reports and white papers”

Thomas Nunez, Beacon Group: “Your money would be better spent hiring someone internally to mine the internet, blogs, books and even vendor presentations on a daily basis. We’ve done that and saved a ton of time and money and made ourselves smarter and quicker in the process”

I liked Thomas idea, but who is smart enough/do you trust enough to do this for you? I used to use FindSVP once in a while for secondary ad-hoc research. But these were very directed one-time projects. To have interesting new stuff come in you would need someone senior looking into it. Perhaps using an internal company blog where multiple people contribute might work? When I worked at the UN/UNICEF we had a morning newsletter covering all the important things that had happened, that was sort of nice.

Stephen Topper, Topper Marketing Consulting: “What company is going to share its secrets for marketing success in some presentation workshop? There’s an entire conference out there perpetuating these Shindigs. Enough already!”

Stephen also had a good point. This is obviously especially true of large client side/fortune 500 companies. They tend to get the best spots, and their presentations are best attended, yet they usually so afraid to share anything of importance and therefore sensor everything down to rather dull common sense info.

So far I have 3 rules for conferences Anderson Analytics participates in:

1. We almost only attend conferences where we are asked to speak (We’ll make an exception once in a while if there is a special topic of interest. And it’s nice to just go once in a while without preparation).
2. We never pay to speak at a conference. Surprisingly this is quite common. (Usually these tend to be the most boring presentations).
3. We only present things we actually find interesting ourselves, even though that usually means sharing some of our knowledge/competitive advantage.

Curious if anyone else has any rules on attending/speaking at conferences?
- Tom