Joe Rydholm can be reached at joe@quirks.com.

The advent of fall has always meant the start of marketing research conference season to me. And of course it still is – ESOMAR, TMRE and Insights Association all stage autumn events – but since we entered the conference space back in 2015 with our first Quirk’s Event, fall has also become the time when we kick off the planning for the next year’s gatherings.

A big part of that process for me is client-side speaker recruitment, which I help coordinate along with cranking out the magazine, and as I did in this space last fall, I wanted to again extend an invitation to client-side readers to consider speaking at one of our 2024 Quirk’s Events:

Dallas: February 28-29

Chicago: March 26-27

London: May 8-9

New York City: July 17-18

Sessions are 30 minutes. Our events don’t have themes or subject tracks, so you could speak about anything and everything marketing research-related: project case studies; best practices; how you navigate internal politics; tips for communicating with the C-suite; why you still love focus groups – you name it!

You don’t need to be doing work that’s on the bleeding edge of innovation (though that’s interesting too!). New tools and methods are constantly cycling in and out of our industry but the old standbys still get a lot of use (especially when they’re budget-friendlier and known quantities for perennially cash-starved and overworked insights departments) and people are always interested in learning how to maximize their utility.

In general, I’ve long urged prospective speakers to think of their sessions as a kind of knowledge exchange, where they share their hard-won tips, tricks and strategies with an audience of their peers, with the goal of helping everyone involved find the insights their organizations need while raising their own internal profile and career prospects.

The best part: You’ll receive free full-conference registration as a token of our thanks for speaking!

If you’ve never attended or spoken at a Quirk’s Event, you can scroll to the bottom of the page at
https://thequirksevent.com to see links to the 2023 Events and get a sense of what some of our past sessions have covered.

While it takes a ton of work to organize and stage four events each year, it is immensely satisfying and the level of support we have received from sponsors, exhibitors, speakers and attendees has been humbling. After nearly 40 years of serving the marketing research industry, with no membership fees or paywalls for our information, word continues to spread about what we do. In 2023 we had a record number of end-client attendees across our four events, which is especially rewarding because that means our target audience is finding value in attending.

I also wanted to make sure to mention our 2023 Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards, the ceremony for which will be broadcast on November 14 at 1 pm Eastern. If you are reading this in time, you can watch the live broadcast or swing back after the fact to https://www.quirksawards.com to catch it. We received over 200 nominations and had help from more than 45 marketing research industry judges in determining the winners. Client-side researchers and their vendor partners are doing so much valuable work and it’s great to see them be recognized for it.

Last but not least I’ll throw out another invitation to contact me if you are interested in writing for the magazine. While client-side researchers are our target audience, most of them understandably are not able to write about the work they do (or even marketing research in general!) so I’ve long had to rely on the vendor-side authors who get what we are trying to do with our content: provide interesting, objective thought-leader-type articles that, like our Quirk’s Event sessions, run the gamut from examining the pros and cons of new tools like AI to writing better questionnaires.

No matter how you’d like to participate, reach out to me at joe@quirks.com and we will get you started!