Sam Winstanley’s Blog

Despite more than 12 years circling around the research industy, this was the first year that I’ve gone to the MRS conference. I’m trying to get more in tune with my customers and their client hanging out at researchy places like this is a key part of this process. The conference is at the Riverbank Plaza hotel which is on the Albert Embankment in London, despite the relative convenience of london, its quite far from any tube station so it takes about as long to get there from north london as it would to get to Brighton…. what would be the point of a conference without adventure.

 In brief, here are my top 5 things from day 1….

1. The Web 2.0 train keep rolling and although I accept that Web 2.0 having a large effect on market research, and Dan O’Donoghue (head of strategic planning at publicis) saying that is inevitable that advertising has to adapt to Web2.0 ways to survive… despite all this obvious stuff (not to belittle it)…. Derek Eccleston and Luca Griseri produced some faily hard evidence that perhaps Web2.0 isn’t as useful for advertising and research as we (being the techies) might all think. Perhaps we are 2 steps ahead and we should take 1 step back… everyone agreed that its usefulness varied a lot by subject matter (on facebook nobody talks about washing powder).
2. In game advertising is huge business and IGA Worldwide are good at doing it.. in Battlefield 2142 and they did a very nice study with TNS to show its effectiveness. As a keen gamer myself I’ve got a lot of respect for this media (incidentally right in the core market demographics for it too).
3. Frighteningly I learned more about modelling and statistical analysis in Tom Lloyd’s (Founder of metametrics) session on Modelling than I did in many years working for SPSS, in fact it was the missing link, somebody finally really described to me how the numbers in linear regression worked outside the context of Physics and as a result I know fully appreciate the benifits and drawbacks of challenger/champion techniques and predictive analytics in general.
4. The Research Liberation Front secret meeting at a secret location not that far away from the conference was hilarious and a loaded with the kind of sarcasm and irony that you can only actually do in public in the UK…
5. Reclining on the exibits at the Dali universe center, does get you told off as I discovered at the party….