Editor's note: Joe Rydholm can be reached at joe@quirks.com.

The end of summer/arrival of fall means that our 2024 slate of Quirk’s Events is in the rearview mirror. It always feels odd to be done with them. Our small-but-mighty team stays so focused on organizing and staging everything – in addition to doing all of our other tasks – that when it’s all over, we almost don’t have the energy to celebrate.

But celebration is certainly warranted!

While the data is anecdotal and qualitative, I think our New York event in July was possibly our best ever. (It was also our biggest and best-attended, drawing a record number of client-side researchers!) I bring that up not to crow but because to me it was a rewarding validation of our decades of work on emphasizing the delivery of quality information to our audiences across our print, digital and in-person products.

I haven’t analyzed the session review data yet but based on the feedback I and other staffers heard, and based on our own experience attending the sessions, it felt like presenters did an especially great job of keeping their talks substantive, useful and relevant.

In theory, that’s what all conference speakers strive for but in practice over the years I have seen many instances at our events and those of other organizations where presenters seemed focused on the opposite goals. Whether because of ego or inexperience or, in the case of a vendor or agency session, pressure from the marketing team or higher-ups to use their 30 minutes before a captive audience to SELL SELL SELL, that approach does nobody any good. Attendees have their time wasted and speakers risk alienating a roomful of peers, colleagues and potential customers.

That’s why we came up with the Quirk’s Q-Mandments, a list of 10 best practices that we urge presenters to abide by. Examples include:

Thou Shalt Be Relevant: During no part of your presentation should you ever sell your company, services or products.

Thou Shalt Be Interesting: Explore new industry territory and present ideas you haven’t seen or shared before.

Thou Shalt Be Engaging: Deliver your presentation with clarity, gusto and actively engage your audience.

As with the biblical commandments that inspired them, they are suggestions and people freely disregard them (though without any threat of eternal damnation, at least as far as we know). I handle a lot of the client-side speaker recruiting and also vet the vendor-side sessions and you never actually know how a speaker will do until they get up there and start talking. Some people I have been sure would be great have not been and others I have worried about have knocked it out of the park. But across all of our events this year and in New York especially it was gratifying to see our insistence on quality paying off and finally getting through, in effect raising the bar for all presenters to avoid standing out with a subpar effort.

The one blemish, if I can call it that, was an increase in client-side researchers going a bit over the top in praising the companies of their vendor-side co-presenters during some vendor/client sessions. Perhaps they were coached/asked to do this or were just trying to do right by their vendor friend. Or maybe they’re just so happy with the vendor that they can’t help themselves. To be sure, it’s better for those sentiments to come from the clients but they still end up sounding to some audience members like commercials, based on the attendee comments I overheard afterwards.

Do it all over again

The thing about having such a great series of events is that you have to do it all over again – and (hopefully) do it better! That takes time and effort so we are already starting the client-side speaker recruitment process. Here are the 2025 Quirk’s Event dates and locations (next year we will be back on the West Coast, swapping 2024 site Dallas for Burbank, Calif.): Los Angeles (February 26-27); Chicago (April 2-3); London (May 7-8); New York (July 23-24).

If you are a client-side researcher, I hope you will consider speaking. It’s a great way to meet new peers and colleagues and reconnect with those you already know. In exchange for presenting you’ll receive full-conference passes for yourself and your in-house research team. Sessions are just 30 minutes. Your presentation can be on just about anything related to the insights profession. I’m happy to help you develop a topic. Reach out at joe@quirks.com and let’s get to work!