Back in 2015, with our first-ever Quirk’s Event, we sought to bring the same kind of content that the magazine delivers to the live setting. It was a wonderful success and showed that we could pivot from being “just” a media company to a media company that also produced events that captured the tone of our print and digital offerings while adding the immediacy and fun of an in-person gathering.
Our first two events of 2020 – London in February and New York in March – went off without a hitch. And then seemingly just days after we all returned to the office from New York, the world changed as COVID-19’s impact began being felt in earnest.
At the time of this writing in early August, it’s hard to believe we will ever get back to staging in-person events. Still, after cancelling our remaining 2020 Chicago gathering, which had been scheduled for this summer, we’ve regrouped for what we hope will be a full 2021 slate, with events in Chicago (June 2-3), New York (July 20-21, moving to the Javits Center) and London (August 17-18).
Throughout the spring we kept hearing from people, “You guys should do a virtual event!” Uhhh, we’ve never done one of those, we would answer. But then, as so often happens around here, conversations started. What would a Quirk’s virtual event look like? How could we re-create some of the fun of our in-person events? Would people even attend if we were able to get one pulled together?
Turns out the answer to that last question was a resounding yes! Our in-house team and our awesome conference-production partners worked feverishly to line up speakers, vet event platforms, build out marketing plans, coordinate with vendors and do the hundreds of other small jobs needed to pull off a multiple-day event. And on July 14-16 we held the Quirk’s Virtual Event, drawing nearly 3,000 registrations (including over 1,600 client-side researchers!) and over 2,500 day-of and post-event attendees.
There were certainly some hiccups – promised platform capabilities either worked sporadically or not at all – but the sessions themselves went well. Some were pre-recorded, some were live and even when there were tech glitches, people remained patient and good-humored, likely a product of the many Zoom calls we’ve all been on in recent months.
During the in-session chats, attendees expressed their excitement to be learning and gathering together (even though it was all virtual) and, along with engaging with the speakers and event sponsors, they shared stories about everything from how their research functions were faring to the weirdness of working from home.
I found the worldwide nature of the gathering particularly heartening – there were many general exchanges of greetings, with people sharing the locales where they were checking in from. That “we’re all in this together” attitude encompassed everything from the personal takes on life during a pandemic to the discussions of how COVID-19 has impacted the job of the marketing researcher. (For more on the latter, see our Q Report section in this issue.)
Clever and resourceful
There are few, if any, good things to come out of the pandemic but one that I keep returning to is how creative people can be when faced with unexpected challenges. Many of the speakers and attendees at the July conference spoke of clever and resourceful adaptations they’ve made in response to changing consumer habits, work setups and internal insights needs.
For our part, we learned a lot from the process, just as we did after our first in-person event and continue to do after all of the subsequent gatherings. I’m hopeful that 2021 will bring a return to in-person events, though the virus has shown us that it’s unmatched in its ability to remorselessly destroy our plans. But if we do need to rely on a virtual approach again, we now know we can do it and deliver a gratifying experience for our beloved audience.
P.S. We are staging another virtual event on October 27-28 and we’d love to have you join us. Head over to www.thequirksevent.com for more information.