Chicago, Chicago…
Just settled into my room in Chicago; we’re in town for a Gatorade research session around the corner from where I’m staying.
Thanks to Omnicom and their fantastic buying power/negotiation skills, we’re able to stay at the Ritz-Carlton downtown, literally across the street from the John Hancock Center, and I have a view of Lake Michigan. It’s a tough life, but tempered by the fact that the focus groups will run until 10:00 P.M. tonight (with a debriefing to follow, no doubt), so my luxury hotel time will mainly be spent with my eyes closed and the blankets pulled up around my chin.
Slightly interesting story about the flight in this morning: There’s bad weather rolling through Chicago today and flight patterns and take-off times were fouled up this morning between here and Dallas. Our flight, unlike many others, took off right on time, flew a direct course with no holding pattern circling, and landed precisely on time. The Captain chimed in over the loudspeakers commenting that the control tower told him his flight was the first to do so all day. Additionally, the service on board was excellent– even on a 100% capacity flight– and we rolled right to the gate with no waiting necessary on the tarmac.
So what gave? The CEO of American Airlines was on board.
Ah-ha.
The next time I fly, I’ll try to call ahead and see if I can dovetail with his travel schedule.
So we’re off to a pre-briefing in a couple of hours and then it’s 8 hours of focus groups and ever-present, research facility M&Ms. This is my twelfth year doing advertising, in one capacity or another, for Quaker Oats/Gatorade (and, once they were purchased, PepsiCo) and, given QOC is a better-marketing-through-science kind of company, you can imagine how many focus groups I’ve sat through.
I do enjoy the research process… for the first two hours. I always enjoy learning something new, but groups usually become repetitive after the second or third one, even when doing novel research into new targets or insights. It’s at that point you’ve either confirmed or denied your proposition and the rest becomes dancing on the head of a pin in terms of learnings and added dimension and detail.
That’s when you realize focus groups are a marathon, not a sprint, and the aforementioned, ever-present M&Ms come in handy (both for their sugar content and for flinging, hail-like, against the one-way glass in hopes of startling the participants on the other side).
Now it’s time for lunch and a phone call in to the She Monkey. If I have any spare time before I catch a cab to the groups, I’ll spend all 45-seconds of it marveling at the expanse of my room.
3 commentsEmail Article Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 at 12:36pm Mack Simpson
Entry Filed under: Ad Jungle, Monkey Travel | add this post to del.icio.us
Technorati Tags: Chicago, Gatorade, Research, Ritz-Carlton
