On Thursday April 21, the Cleveland AMA held its annual Marketing Research Conference at the DoubleTree Cleveland South in Independence. In total there where 119 individuals in attendance; including 7 Committee Members, 9 Speakers and 18 Students. The conference was brought together after nine months of planning on the part of the committee.  Eight sponsors helped provide financial support for the effort:  ABR LLC, ORC International, MARC, Radius Global Market Research, MarketVision Research, Schmidt, Opinions LTD, and Thoroughbred Research Group.  Featured were six presentations focused on a variety of marketing research topics, ranging from the challenges of online sampling to final reporting of research results to clients.  In addition, there where numerous door prizes to be won, donated by area restaurants and entertainment venues as well as research companies.  Overall reactions to the conference seemed positive and many of those in attendance noted that they were repeat attendees from the prior year.  Personally as a first time attendant I felt the conference was a great way to meet fellow colleagues engaged in the field, learn about present issues within the local market, and pick up new tips and ideas to utilize to in my own research.  The presenters where very knowledgeable about their particular topics and I felt many of the presentations where informative and helpful in understanding the activities of marketing research from a professional level

The six presentations included during the course of the event included these topics by the following individuals:  Can We Finally Kill the Grid?  Going Beyond ‘Mobile’ for Survey Design Solutions (Bob Graff, Director, MarketVision Research); The Evolving World of Online Sample:  A Discussion From the Perspective of Both Buyers and Sellers (Rod Antilla, President, ABR and Patrick Stokes, Executive Director, Federated Sample); The Key to Developing Optimizing and Testing Winning Concepts (Linda Mauro and Lauren Goldblum, Principals, illume LLC); Market Research and US:  Birds of a Feather or A Cat Among The Pigeons (Tom Bubnick, User Experience/User Interface Manager, American Greetings, and Kristen Deevers, Senior Manager/Consumer Insights, American Greetings); Social Network Analysis:  A Competitive Intelligence Primer (Kathleen Moore Ph.D. Professor both at Tom Ridge School of Intelligence Studies and Mercyhurst University); and Data, Dashboards, Powerpoint and Infographics:  The Market Research Reporting Landscape Today and Into the Future (Kevin Mahler, Research Director, Schmidt Market Research).