I took the opportunity to get my head out of the day-to-day yesterday and get myself along to the “Best of MRS Awards and Events” Conference at Co-op HQ in Manchester.
To be honest, I’ve been pretty sceptical about attending these types of industry events in the past. Not sure I’ve ever walked away from one feeling like I’ve benefited much.
Equally, I’ve always been vocal about the London-centric nature of the MRS, their events and attendees. They’ve never felt inclusive for researchers across the UK as a whole, especially when you throw in travel costs (and are already questioning the benefit).
So, with this one being round the corner from our office, it felt pretty hypocritical not to go along and support it. We’re not going to get more events in the North if we don’t, are we?
What did I think of it?
It was fine.
Did I come away from it feeling like I was wowed? Absolutely not. Did I learn a lot? Not really. Should I expect to? Probably not, but when it’s the “Best of”, maybe I should?
The Co-op team did a great job hosting the event. It was well organised and a really good setting. The majority of the speakers were engaging and spoke well, and there were plenty of questions from the audience (some interesting and challenging; some a bit random and feeling like a question to be seen to be asking a question).
From a content point-of-view, for me the best bits were when the presentation touched on the wider application and successes of research findings (Google, Ladbible) rather than the show-and-tell of “this is how we delivered a (pretty standard) project” or when I felt like I was being sold a method.
I found it a bit odd that an exercise meant to showcase the need to communicate and engage with different people in different ways… was delivered by getting everybody in the room to perform a generic task in exactly the same way that some felt uncomfortable with (and this definitely wasn’t some ‘reverse scenario’ method to try and demonstrate this).
In reality, the best of the “Best of” was just catching up with ex-colleagues, suppliers, agencies from my client-side days etc. It was really nice to see some people I haven’t spoken to in ages.
The things I’ll mostly take away from it though are:
- From what I heard, I feel very confident that Mustard are at the front of the curve when it comes to the application of AI.
- It’s good to get your head out of your own agency bubble. You sometimes worry that bigger, more well known on the scene agencies must be doing better things than you to have that position. They’re not. That’s reassuring.
- It’s also good to speak to people about common challenges and get different perspectives.
- People have some fantastic bullshit names to make their briefing meetings, workshops and debriefs sound “more-than”.
The event was sold out which was great to see. You’d like to think that this level of support might help a push for more Northern events. If it does, will I go back? Possibly, but probably more for the people than the content.
But should I even be there? Maybe events like these need to be more specifically focused and tailored to drive a better experience and engagement? I know an exercise about that…