Tom Denari wasn’t trying to revolutionize conferences when Young & Laramore started planning their first Unreasonable event five years ago. The president and CEO of the Indianapolis agency just wanted to solve a problem that kept coming up in client meetings.
“You could really ruin a meeting by having to back up and really try to educate people on how people make decisions,” Denari explains. While other conferences chased trends, there was nowhere for marketers to learn directly from the academics studying human behavior.
So they built it themselves.
How the academic-marketing world works
The Unreasonable Conference brings researchers from institutions like Wharton, Cornell and Emory directly to marketing professionals for a day of accessible, practical sessions. Each speaker gets 20-25 minutes to present their research and its business applications—think TED talk format, not academic conference.
“We told the speakers this is not an academic conference,” Denari notes. “You’re talking to marketers, not people trying to punch holes in your research. You’re trying to apply what you’ve learned and help marketers understand what it really means.”
The format works: seven speakers throughout the day, with Young & Laramore’s head of strategy Terry O’Neill and Denari weaving connections between presentations and real-world case studies. Two talks, a break, Q&A, repeat.
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What surprised Denari most was discovering how tight the academic marketing research community is. “They know each other,” he says. “They enjoy the event as much as the people attending because they’re learning from each other and that interaction as well.”
That network effect has made speaker recruitment easier each year. The first year was the hardest—academics weren’t sure what this thing was. Now? “It’s like, ‘Oh, Kelly Goldsmith was in this? Oh, then yeah, I’m totally on board.'”
Building something pure
The conference operates on a break-even model with one sponsor—client Cummins, who brings their own team and has supported the event for years. “It’s not a sales pitch from a bunch of vendors trying to sell you on anything,” Denari emphasizes.
That purity extends to the learning experience. Post-event surveys consistently return 90% positive ratings, with scheduling conflicts being the main reason people can’t attend rather than content dissatisfaction.
For Young & Laramore, the conference reinforces their existing approach to consumer research—they conduct their own qualitative research with entire teams involved in one-on-one interviews. “It’s been part of our DNA as an agency to do great creative and strategy work, and this is an extension of that.”
Watch this section: 12:20
The business development benefits happen naturally. “We’ve had clients that we hadn’t worked with, that we had one client in particular who didn’t choose us in the pitch process, but they came to the event and stayed in our orbit. And then two years later, we were working with them.”
The year-long process indie agencies need to know
For agencies considering creating their own industry event, Denari breaks down the real timeline and investment. Speaker recruitment starts immediately after each event and takes close to six months because academics have teaching schedules to navigate.
Promotion begins about five months out. Main expenses: speaker fees, travel, venue and catering. “If we’re breaking even on it, I’m fine,” Denari says. “It’s an investment to some extent.”
The energy payoff extends beyond business development. “Our people are really energized by it. People love working on this. People enjoy seeing it and getting the learning and the knowledge. It makes them feel good that we’re doing something like this.”
Watch this section: 15:45
This year’s event runs Friday, September 26th at Newfields (home of the Indianapolis Museum of Art). The Friday timing is new—previous years ran on different days, but Fridays typically offer lighter travel for attendees.
The venue naturally limits capacity, though Denari notes the lunch portion creates more of a boundary than the theater seating. “That’d be a great problem to have” if they need to expand beyond Newfields.
What Young & Laramore built
Five years in, the Unreasonable Conference has become the only event consistently bringing academic researchers directly to marketing professionals. It’s spawned South by Southwest panels featuring “unreasonable alumni” and created a model other agencies notice.
But for Young & Laramore, the real win is simpler: they solved their own problem and created something the industry needed. No sales pitches, no vendor booths, no fluff—just academics talking to marketers about how people actually make decisions.
Because sometimes the best business strategy is building exactly what you wish existed.
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