The fall brings a lot of different things besides colder weather; it also brings a heavy research conference calendar. AMA, IIR, CASRO, MRA, WOMMA, ESOMAR, QRCA and many others all had research-focused conferences.
Recently when I was at a conference, one of the new contacts I made mentioned which of the concurrent sessions he was going to and then added something odd. He said, "I’m a mover." When I asked for clarification, he replied that most concurrent presentation sessions aren’t good and when he starts feeling one is a total waste of time, he MOVES to another session.
This conversation gave me a chance to think about what makes a presentation good, and made me wonder what people really want out of a conference presentation.
Here are a few things that I really want:
- I really want to hear results. Not pie in the sky but results on how a system or procedure saved them money, increased revenue, led to a successful new product or something like that.
- I also would like one takeaway — one thing that I can implement or at least evaluate at our company
- I want the presenter to have me think about something differently. I really want to be able to say, "Hey that’s interesting, I never thought of it that way."
- Clean slides. I don’t want to have slides that are very text-heavy and hard to follow.
What about you?
What do you really want in a conference presentation?
I look forward to reading your comments.
Adam Jolley says:
Hi Merrill,
I agree with a lot of the values that you look for in presentations. Mainly, I try to chose presentations that I think will give me the “new twist” on an old idea. After all, these sessions really are meant to be extensions on education.
My biggest pet peeve beyond sloppy sides is the 45 minute commercial. I realize its hard, especially for vendors (ie – panels, programmers, softwares) not to have a bias towards your own offerings and how they worked perfect in your findings (of course they did). But often, I leave with the feeling that I was either sold to or sold against (since I would be a vendor). Lately, because of this I’ve stuck to the end-client based presentations.