What are conferences for?
I am in the midst of the September-November conference season. Having spent last week at the Australian Marketing Institute’s annual conference in Melbourne and being just about to attend the ESOMAR 3D event in Amsterdam and the MRSS annual conference in Singapore my mind turns to thinking about the purposes of conferences. Several things seem to have changed about conferences over the last 20 years: There are a lot more of them A smaller proportion are category specific (20 years ago more of them focused on things like retail, or finance, or auto). A larger proportion tackle ‘fashionable’, generalised topics. In 2012 we have been deluged with mobile related conferences. Attendances for the larger conferences tend to be smaller than 20 years ago. For example, there are very few attracting over 800 delegates these days. Attendance fees appear to be paying for a smaller part of the cost of conferences, with sponsorship becoming ever more important – a pattern which is mirroring how a large part media has changed over the last 20 years. The key sponsors of conferences used to be research agencies. These days the key sponsors tend to be suppliers to the research industry, such as the […]