We asked our Director Business Development Germany Jonathan Heinemann to give his impression of this year’s GOR conference in Cologne:

“At GOR, it’s always a pleasure to delve into the academic world, where focus is more on methodology, hypothesis & sample quality than on delivering quick KPIs.

My GOR opened by attending the keynote by Stefan Oglesby from data IQ, who referred to “The Future of Consumer Insight in the Digital Era” and the challenges of combining various data sources. “In search of inspiration – Exploring the product category” by Kernwert was next up and of special interest to me as we delivered the study participants for the correspondent online community, followed by  “Predicting Political Behaviour & Preferences Using Digital Trace Data” where I was co-author.

As every year, the Poster Award showing study design + results in brief, was an inspiration; fundamentally it is very similar to elevator pitches, where you concentrate on the essentials. One of my personal highlights was also the presentation on “Stichprobenqualität und Repräsentativät in der Online-Forschung” (sample quality and representativeness in online research), where forsa, Norstat and Civey gave interesting input, in the end far more factual than expected but still informative and entertaining.

Although I had the very last slot for presenting our findings on “Is Influencer Marketing overpromising?”, many people attended the session. I again was a bit too enthusiastic on the topic itself and my talk lasted longer than the time slot; however, I hope it provided the audience with insights and a good round up of a successful GOR.

Thanks to the organisation committee for the great nice event, looking forward to next year!”