ESOMAR Congress I - Hello to Berlin

The 60th ESOMAR Congress has kicked off at the Intercontinental Hotel in Berlin, offering an astonishing variety of fare including a children's choir, researchers both navel- and future-gazing, a very tall and celebrated film director, and three Scottish ladies on MR's contribution to the 'joy' of 'doing it with the lights on'.

The conference theme, 'Excellence', was perhaps responsible for the variety, giving absolutely no guide to speakers as to the content they must provide, or to delegates as to what they could expect. Which makes it as good as almost any Conference theme as far as we're concerned.

Being the 60th Congress, the day started with a welcome address and a look back to the foundation of the association in a very different post-war world, by twenty-nine passionate individuals looking to inject some optimism and vitality into the profession after the gloom of the previous decade.

Veronique Jeannin, ESOMAR's Director General, welcomed 1,300 delegates from 75 countries; Matthew Fargel, Germany's ESOMAR representative followed up with a personal greeting; and association President Fritz Spangenberg rounded off with a rapid summary of the key trends in the global MR industry.

Session Chairman John Kearon said MR was the 'hot' area of marketing services, and that the panel had chosen papers according to the same criteria used to judge diamonds, their brilliance, clarity, colour and weight. A daunting comparison perhaps for some speakers but not we suspect today's keynote speaker, 6 foot 9 inch Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, born and raised in Berlin, whose talk gave some idea of the obstacles he has overcome in order to produce an Oscar-winning film first time out.

It's fashionable at conferences these days to bring keynote speakers in from outside the profession, if just to remind the fustier delegates that there is an outside - but it's not uncommon for most of their talks to pass without thought for the apparent encumbrance of 'relevance to research'. In this case the speaker managed admirably, both in giving his audience 'something completely different' and in hanging it on an MR hook.

von Donnersmarck showed his short black and white film school movie, Doberman, to general enthusiasm, then launched into the tale of his next project, rather a big leap up to a movie with a budget of more than a million euros and five years in the making. Aside from shades of ethnography in the way one of its protagonists becomes involved in the lives of two others he is shadowing, the film arguably owes its eventual success to market research, or more specifically the MR department at Disney subsidiary and film distributor Buena Vista, who managed to look beyond the generally negative reaction to the film at test showings, to the possibility of a strong niche appeal. The hunch was followed up by targeted testing among young people interested in artistic films and the company decided it had 'a hit on its hands'. Coincidentally, the film was released today on DVD, having more than justified the faith of the company, making more than 2.3 million Euros in Germany alone.

Among the hard lessons learnt along the way - and of key interest in the light of recent research trends - von Donnersmarck suggested he had learnt to differentiate between the different ways that people say 'No', seeking out cause for optimism in fine distinctions, for example between being told 'I can't really work with you' and the more definitve 'I will not work with you'.

For more on today's ESOMAR Conference, including what happened to Philips' superbly named post-war 'Commercial Precalculation and Planning Dept', and the views of those liberated Scotswomen, see today's other Congress article.


Factual Reporting by Mel Crowther; comments, errors and anything offensive added by Nick Thomas

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.