The following is a guest post from Steve Henke, 20|20 president, who was in Amsterdam earlier this week for the ESOMAR Congress. Here are his thoughts from the last two days of the conference:

Days 2 and 3 at the ESOMAR stayed busy… though everyone seemed to get a later start on these days. Clearly, many of the delegates were taking advantage of the evening social activities and just Amsterdam itself (which, by the way, is an incredible city!).

What we heard in the booth stayed consistent with the the first two days… “We’re interested in online qual and know that it’s time to get involved.” In fact, when I got back to my office this morning, there were already several messages from attendees at the Congress – anxious to get started with us!

Interestingly, the content of the Congress didn’t really reflect this sentiment. There were only a couple sessions covering either online qualitative research or mobile qualitative research. I thought that was odd. The hot topic was gamification – using game-playing to engage participants at a higher level. Seems to me a little like putting the cart before the horse.

But all in all, it was a good and valuable 4 days. Next year’s Congress will be held in Atlanta. We’ll see you there.