My brother in law hooked me up a few times through the Major Ad Agency he worked for. Two things: Unlike today’s focus group copy writing exercise / psychodrama, we were always paid in cash and and AND we were paid upon arrival. Nice work when I could get it.
When I was a teen the local mall had a space that was dedicated to focus groups. Their staff would wait outside of their area and ask questions to those that passed by. If you qualified and were interested, you were invited to participate. Most of the ones friends and I did were taste tests or short surveys. We usually were paid $5 cash. They did bigger groups (car test drives and the like) but I wasn’t old enough then.
A few. The best was when they played five second clips of songs and asked if I’d change the channel after hearing the clip on the radio. It made me realize how little time I really gave to radio songs before moving to the next station. Most of the music was crappy, but then, so is most of the music on the radio.
@walarney@conandlibrarian Yeah, you can tell it was traumatic experience if a movie with a full frontal of Dana Delaney and the takeaway was that Rosie O’Donnell was in it.
I want to run a metafocus group to find out how poor photographers who are distracted feel about Ford’s new compact car model. I think it would be quite the challenge.
When I was younger, the mall I used to go to always had people with clipboards trying to reel you in. I finally answered them and got to look at Pepsi bottles with different labels to say which ones I liked better. After getting paid for that, I’ve been more open minded to these things, but I’ve never run across anyone wanting to pick me for anything.
I’m currently doing the Google Opinion Rewards on my phone that gives me Play Store credit. After just a few seriously quick surveys, I have around $1.50.
Back when I was in high school, my Mom snagged being in Nabisco focus group for what turned out to be Teddy Grahams. I remember her getting a couple boxes of each flavor and sending in forms on what my sisters and I liked and didn’t about them. They were just the bear cookies that came in the white Nabisco box until a year or so later when we saw them in the grocery store
I was in a focus group for a TV show called “Drive.” It was a really great show (at least the extended pilot) but several of the key features that I thought made it unique were taken out by the time they aired it for real. Plus they aired it against American Idol (back when it was still fairly new and popular) so it failed.
I also once did one for Pringles, trying different flavours. For some reason, though, two of the three they sent me were ones they already had out. I didn’t mind, got $15 and three cases of single-serve sized Pringles.
I once had dinner at a fancy restaurant with the new editors team of a magazine I subscribe to. They were very nice and seemed to genuinely care that they didn’t mess anything up but the magazine has unfortunately turned into something I’m not interested in.
I’ve participate in usability studies at Microsoft. They “pay” you with software. It’s been a long time since I’ve done one, but I still get a call every couple of years.
The closest thing I ever got was when I did my teenage tour at fast food and on two separate occasions, secret shoppers graded my performance.
Thanks to both of them wherever they may be. Both said I did a “suggestive sell” (do you want fries with that?), which was something I never did. I therefore got a score of 100% on each occasion, and not suggestive selling was a big deal to management.
I got to do one many maybe 10 years ago when visiting Hershey’s chocolate factory. My friend and I got to do a full taste test and assessment of like 6-8 different potential new recipes for Caramello bars, and we were paid in additional chocolates. It was definitely a fun time.
I just answer the “1-minute” Foresee surveys online. I get past the 1-minute mark then mark C or 5 of 10 on everything. Then if there is a comment block, I launch a tirade in ALL CAPS and threaten the children of the liars who told me it was going to be one minute when there ended up being two hundred highly involved questions that threatened to rob me of an entire afternoon. Also I announce my desire to purchase anything but the products advertised on that page and my pledge to never visit the website again. I only do that when I’m bored. Normally, I just close it.
Did a cancer one with a pharma. Paid $150 - this was about 5 years ago. They were interested in cancer patient decision making as influenced by drug advertising. Likely I was not representative of the “norm” since I can read science research and hunt for that kind of info in places that don’t have a conflict of interest/vested interest.
Been on a mock jury once too that the defense attorney set up to defend an auto company over a kid killed by an electric window that didn’t have an auto shut off. Paid $100 for that (this was years ago so no idea what they’d pay these days).
@melonscoop yes for a real case. As far as I remember it was that parents need to supervise their kids and not leave little kids unsupervised in the car (they had run back into the house to get something they had forgotten, that parents should anticipate that kids will play with things in the car that are dangerous; that if they left the keys in there it wasn’t their fault either if the kid started and then crashed the car any more than this is their fault… The major argument they couldn’t get around was that having a safety shut off on the windows when it hits a jam (like a neck) should be mandatory; that is something that could have been easily anticipated, especially since other kids had died this way…
I have participated in a number of them. More often than not I have been the moderator. If you can afford it, custom research is generally 3 steps. Start with 1 on 1 interviews to give you a start on what people are thinking. Focus groups are a second step to test what you learned in the first step when people have a chance to interact. Finally, the first two steps allow you to create a productive survey to see how wide spread the opinions you found in the focus groups are in the general population.
I generally take any online survey that comes my way just to see how poorly they have been constructed.
(The Meh “surveys” are strictly for entertainment in the first place so I enjoy then all the more)
@Boiler3k Like the Foresee survey that popped over my search just after I mentioned them above (physically broken). Hit Submit, only to be informed that the obscured question 26.1 had to be answered. Toggled lots of tick-boxes before it showed up and commented that their survey is broken. Also my only complaint was that a f&@#$ng survey kept popping over what I wanted to do on the web page.
@Boiler3k I agree on how shitty many surveys are. I design them for a biomed start up (got that job after emailing them and telling them the problems with the one I was taking - cancer research). I teach research design, took a survey design class from someone who designs them for the census and gallup poles…
Back in my 20s I got hooked up with a consumer survey company in San Francisco. I went a number of times but the one I remember is that we got to taste what were obviously Snickers bars. They all tasted the same to me, which is to say like yummy Snickers bars. One day it was raining and I was running a little late and I ran into a Super Shuttle van so I ended up being too late to participate. They never called me again.
Super Shuttle sent me a bill for repairing the tiny dent in the van. I was going to pay it but my dashing and bold friend Rose told me to just throw it away. She said if they were serious they’d follow up. They never did. For a few years I’d see occasionally that van on the road (#317) and the dent never got fixed.
When I was a kid we (younger bro, older sis) somehow got involved in candy taste testing. Every few weeks we would get a box filled with candy bars, like Noah’s Ark, two of everything, one of the real candy, and one knockoff. It was obvious what candy bar we were testing and usually pretty obvious with one was real, the knockoffs weren’t bad, just not as good most of the time.
Was I helping to shape the future of snack food industry? I don’t know, it was free candy.
I’m not sure but I think our parents were getting paid for the services of their precious little lab rats.
When we were vacationing in Vegas they gave us a free meal coupon to to be on a focus group for Survivor when it was in development. Hated it, but it’s done well anyway. I’ve been on several product or ad campaign evaluation focus groups, picked more or less at random from a passing crowd. The funniest thing about them are the nondisclosure agreements, protecting trade secrets. I was in lots of focus groups for work. Some examples, I was the City’s representative on a think tank of various big funders on How to Strengthen Local Small Non Profits. I was a member of several groups put together by national funders to provide feedback and input on funding strategies. I was a member of any number of committees working to find some kind of balance between community funds and needs. I’m not exactly sure where the line between focus group and committees exists, I suspect the dividing line is opinion vs power to enact change.
I used to work for a Market Research firm in Seattle called Gilmore. I totally did focus groups after I left. It is /was easy money . Not that many in Portland compared to Seattle though
When I lived in San Francisco I was doing focus groups about once a month. My fav was a “Shopping Experience” group. I came in a week earlier for instructions to discover $120 in cash to purchase a pair of jeans. Bought a crazy expensive pair of jeans. Came back at the appointed time. My name was called and I was told they had overbooked. I was given another envelope with $100 cash, thanked and told I could go home!
My email must have been passed around as I got an invitation for another group of “Dinner” surveys. The highest dinner was $60 which was paid back then they added a bit more on top after doing the survey.
I could have made a living off the Starbuck surveys. Paid about $15 + extras and in a city like SF you could do one every hour for two weeks.
Living in a small city there are not many worth while opportunities… but RewardSurvey has the easiest surveys for great free magazines. Offers change all the time but I had The Wall Street Journal for a year free with RewardSurvey.
I help to run a survey on the health of mothers and babies. So I’ve run focus groups trying to suss out why people do and do not answer surveys.
@melonscoop BRFSS?
@jmendenhall Very close! I help coordinate PRAMS.
@melonscoop I ran a telephone room for a company that handled the BRFSS study for Washington and Oregon. Those Surveys took forever to complete.
I sat in on a pilot viewing of Mike & Molly. All I can say is I tried. Bad TV triumphs when good people say nothing.
My brother in law hooked me up a few times through the Major Ad Agency he worked for. Two things: Unlike today’s focus group copy writing exercise / psychodrama, we were always paid in cash and and AND we were paid upon arrival. Nice work when I could get it.
No but I’d like to. I love fucking things up when I’ve got nothing on the line!
I’ve done online focus surveys for Jamba, Del Taco, and the CocaCola freestyle app. $10 gift cards once in a while are nice.
When I was a teen the local mall had a space that was dedicated to focus groups. Their staff would wait outside of their area and ask questions to those that passed by. If you qualified and were interested, you were invited to participate. Most of the ones friends and I did were taste tests or short surveys. We usually were paid $5 cash. They did bigger groups (car test drives and the like) but I wasn’t old enough then.
@uraqtc I hate to break it to you but that was Scientology.
@SSteve “If you prefer the taste of Jelly B, your thetan levels are dangerously high. Come with us. And we’ll need that $5 back.”
@SSteve Which is worse: being successfully recruited by Scientologists or being rejected?
@SSteve
now that explains things!
A few. The best was when they played five second clips of songs and asked if I’d change the channel after hearing the clip on the radio. It made me realize how little time I really gave to radio songs before moving to the next station. Most of the music was crappy, but then, so is most of the music on the radio.
I saw an absolutely terrible movie which features Rosie O’Donnell and BDSM. That was a screening I will never forget.
@conandlibrarian but didn’t it also have Dana Dalany?
@walarney @conandlibrarian Yeah, you can tell it was traumatic experience if a movie with a full frontal of Dana Delaney and the takeaway was that Rosie O’Donnell was in it.
Every once in a while. I have been on panels as diverse as rum flavors to sneakers to movie reviews. If it is fun and paid why not.
I want to run a metafocus group to find out how poor photographers who are distracted feel about Ford’s new compact car model. I think it would be quite the challenge.
When I was younger, the mall I used to go to always had people with clipboards trying to reel you in. I finally answered them and got to look at Pepsi bottles with different labels to say which ones I liked better. After getting paid for that, I’ve been more open minded to these things, but I’ve never run across anyone wanting to pick me for anything.
I’m currently doing the Google Opinion Rewards on my phone that gives me Play Store credit. After just a few seriously quick surveys, I have around $1.50.
Back when I was in high school, my Mom snagged being in Nabisco focus group for what turned out to be Teddy Grahams. I remember her getting a couple boxes of each flavor and sending in forms on what my sisters and I liked and didn’t about them. They were just the bear cookies that came in the white Nabisco box until a year or so later when we saw them in the grocery store
I was in a focus group for a TV show called “Drive.” It was a really great show (at least the extended pilot) but several of the key features that I thought made it unique were taken out by the time they aired it for real. Plus they aired it against American Idol (back when it was still fairly new and popular) so it failed.
I also once did one for Pringles, trying different flavours. For some reason, though, two of the three they sent me were ones they already had out. I didn’t mind, got $15 and three cases of single-serve sized Pringles.
I once had dinner at a fancy restaurant with the new editors team of a magazine I subscribe to. They were very nice and seemed to genuinely care that they didn’t mess anything up but the magazine has unfortunately turned into something I’m not interested in.
I’ve participate in usability studies at Microsoft. They “pay” you with software. It’s been a long time since I’ve done one, but I still get a call every couple of years.
@walarney I forgot about that one! I got some pretty good software that way.
The closest thing I ever got was when I did my teenage tour at fast food and on two separate occasions, secret shoppers graded my performance.
Thanks to both of them wherever they may be. Both said I did a “suggestive sell” (do you want fries with that?), which was something I never did. I therefore got a score of 100% on each occasion, and not suggestive selling was a big deal to management.
@DrWorm “Suggestive sale”, for when you want to have sex sell but the ESRB has weird phrases so you have to settle.
I got to do one many maybe 10 years ago when visiting Hershey’s chocolate factory. My friend and I got to do a full taste test and assessment of like 6-8 different potential new recipes for Caramello bars, and we were paid in additional chocolates. It was definitely a fun time.
@Nuurgle somuchenvy
I just answer the “1-minute” Foresee surveys online. I get past the 1-minute mark then mark C or 5 of 10 on everything. Then if there is a comment block, I launch a tirade in ALL CAPS and threaten the children of the liars who told me it was going to be one minute when there ended up being two hundred highly involved questions that threatened to rob me of an entire afternoon. Also I announce my desire to purchase anything but the products advertised on that page and my pledge to never visit the website again. I only do that when I’m bored. Normally, I just close it.
Did a cancer one with a pharma. Paid $150 - this was about 5 years ago. They were interested in cancer patient decision making as influenced by drug advertising. Likely I was not representative of the “norm” since I can read science research and hunt for that kind of info in places that don’t have a conflict of interest/vested interest.
Been on a mock jury once too that the defense attorney set up to defend an auto company over a kid killed by an electric window that didn’t have an auto shut off. Paid $100 for that (this was years ago so no idea what they’d pay these days).
@Kidsandliz Holy smokes - was the mock jury a test run for a real case? What was the basis for the argument that the company wasn’t at fault?
@melonscoop yes for a real case. As far as I remember it was that parents need to supervise their kids and not leave little kids unsupervised in the car (they had run back into the house to get something they had forgotten, that parents should anticipate that kids will play with things in the car that are dangerous; that if they left the keys in there it wasn’t their fault either if the kid started and then crashed the car any more than this is their fault… The major argument they couldn’t get around was that having a safety shut off on the windows when it hits a jam (like a neck) should be mandatory; that is something that could have been easily anticipated, especially since other kids had died this way…
I have participated in a number of them. More often than not I have been the moderator. If you can afford it, custom research is generally 3 steps. Start with 1 on 1 interviews to give you a start on what people are thinking. Focus groups are a second step to test what you learned in the first step when people have a chance to interact. Finally, the first two steps allow you to create a productive survey to see how wide spread the opinions you found in the focus groups are in the general population.
I generally take any online survey that comes my way just to see how poorly they have been constructed.
(The Meh “surveys” are strictly for entertainment in the first place so I enjoy then all the more)
@Boiler3k Like the Foresee survey that popped over my search just after I mentioned them above (physically broken). Hit Submit, only to be informed that the obscured question 26.1 had to be answered. Toggled lots of tick-boxes before it showed up and commented that their survey is broken. Also my only complaint was that a f&@#$ng survey kept popping over what I wanted to do on the web page.
@Boiler3k I agree on how shitty many surveys are. I design them for a biomed start up (got that job after emailing them and telling them the problems with the one I was taking - cancer research). I teach research design, took a survey design class from someone who designs them for the census and gallup poles…
@Boiler3k I don’t recall that Meh has ever officially stated they wouldn’t save or use the survey data.
https://meh.com/forum/topics/our-pretty-public-privacy-policy
@walarney True Dat. I’m just extrapolating from the general vibe of the forum.
Back in my 20s I got hooked up with a consumer survey company in San Francisco. I went a number of times but the one I remember is that we got to taste what were obviously Snickers bars. They all tasted the same to me, which is to say like yummy Snickers bars. One day it was raining and I was running a little late and I ran into a Super Shuttle van so I ended up being too late to participate. They never called me again.
Super Shuttle sent me a bill for repairing the tiny dent in the van. I was going to pay it but my dashing and bold friend Rose told me to just throw it away. She said if they were serious they’d follow up. They never did. For a few years I’d see occasionally that van on the road (#317) and the dent never got fixed.
@SSteve That dent probably would not have, even had you paid.
When I was a kid we (younger bro, older sis) somehow got involved in candy taste testing. Every few weeks we would get a box filled with candy bars, like Noah’s Ark, two of everything, one of the real candy, and one knockoff. It was obvious what candy bar we were testing and usually pretty obvious with one was real, the knockoffs weren’t bad, just not as good most of the time.
Was I helping to shape the future of snack food industry? I don’t know, it was free candy.
I’m not sure but I think our parents were getting paid for the services of their precious little lab rats.
@number51 Mom, when we were kids, used to be a consumer tester for Stouffer’s frozen dinners. They got paid and then could buy dinners at a discount.
When we were vacationing in Vegas they gave us a free meal coupon to to be on a focus group for Survivor when it was in development. Hated it, but it’s done well anyway. I’ve been on several product or ad campaign evaluation focus groups, picked more or less at random from a passing crowd. The funniest thing about them are the nondisclosure agreements, protecting trade secrets. I was in lots of focus groups for work. Some examples, I was the City’s representative on a think tank of various big funders on How to Strengthen Local Small Non Profits. I was a member of several groups put together by national funders to provide feedback and input on funding strategies. I was a member of any number of committees working to find some kind of balance between community funds and needs. I’m not exactly sure where the line between focus group and committees exists, I suspect the dividing line is opinion vs power to enact change.
Nobody cares what I think.
@Barney
/image “purple thinking”
I used to work for a Market Research firm in Seattle called Gilmore. I totally did focus groups after I left. It is /was easy money . Not that many in Portland compared to Seattle though
When I lived in San Francisco I was doing focus groups about once a month. My fav was a “Shopping Experience” group. I came in a week earlier for instructions to discover $120 in cash to purchase a pair of jeans. Bought a crazy expensive pair of jeans. Came back at the appointed time. My name was called and I was told they had overbooked. I was given another envelope with $100 cash, thanked and told I could go home!
My email must have been passed around as I got an invitation for another group of “Dinner” surveys. The highest dinner was $60 which was paid back then they added a bit more on top after doing the survey.
I could have made a living off the Starbuck surveys. Paid about $15 + extras and in a city like SF you could do one every hour for two weeks.
Living in a small city there are not many worth while opportunities… but RewardSurvey has the easiest surveys for great free magazines. Offers change all the time but I had The Wall Street Journal for a year free with RewardSurvey.