The TV Pilot Hoax of 1997
Tomorrow I will write about shopping experiences and make reference to a market research scam and a story I had.
Today I tell that story.
Circa 1997, I was invited to be in the test audience of a new show. You were invited in this room and they said they would show you you two pilots and asked your thoughts on them. While there, however, they said they had some technical difficulties and would we mind looking at these marketing things. Which pickle jar design made you most interested in buying the pickles. I’m not being silly. It was literally pickle jars, among other things. Eventually there were two pilots. One of them was a sitcom with a sassy housekeeper. The second I remember a bit more clearly as it had one of the actors from Dukes of Hazzard in it about a blended family. They were both so very unoriginal and by-the-numbers that it felt like I had seem them before. But aside that from there was something just… odd… about them. The feel of the show was wrong. The discussion about them was maybe twenty minutes long.
It wasn’t until later when I was talking to someone about it that he said he had seen one of the shows I was talking about. He was able to name a couple things about it that I hadn’t mentioned, but honestly as soon he said he’d seen it before I knew. It wasn’t familiar because it was unoriginal, it was familiar because I had almost certainly seem them too. The Dukes of Hazzard one for sure. The sassy housekeeper one probably though maybe I was thinking of a different sassy housekeeper. I did not know at the time that it was a show from nine years earlier that ran for eight episodes.
The whole thing was a ruse to get us to look at pickle jars.
Now consider, for a moment, what this tells you about life before the Internet. Companies were so desperate for marketing feedback that they set up an a whole ruse to get a room full of people to spend an hour looking at them. They rented a convention room at a hotel, sent out I have no idea how many invitations to get the participation they needed.
Somebody, somewhere, was paying for all of this.
For pickle jars.
It kind of boggles the mind.
They could get that information today offering up some Arby’s gift cards.
It also speaks to the lack of information flow that they could do this. They could take a show that was nine years old and ran for several episodes and assume that nobody would identify it. That if anyone had seen it before, it would be a vague recollection that they couldn’t put their finger on. And in those days, there was nowhere track that show down. You could easily just assume it was all in your head as I probably would have if my friend hadn’t confirmed it. To be honest, if I hadn’t been able to track the show down I would still be less than 100% sure it was a TV show that actually aired (as opposed to some unaired pilot they had somehow gotten ahold of). IMDb existed at the time, but at that time had a lot of gaps when it came to TV shows.
So back in those olden days, they could just take a TV show and tell people it was new and there you go. And this was apparently a cost efficient way of doing so.
That this was something that could happen, and did happen, boggles my mind.
Part of it is scale. A one percent shift in sales is a HUGE number when we talking about national food companies big brands. Well worth hiring dozens of people to investigate how to do that.
Another problem is they want to observe what you do without you knowing what answer they’re looking for because if you know that will affect your answers.
The way they’d do it now days is they’d show different internet ads. You see ad “A”, so do 10000 other people, but 10000 others are shown ad “B”. Then they check your clicks. They also checkout whether they want to have the model wear a red dress rather than blue and whatever.
There are lots of serious players paying serious money on this sort of thing.Report
I guess the question is whether the use of internet-based marketing techniques has made things better or worse.
Apparently pickle jars are a significant enough factor in selling pickles that it’s worth it to sink this sort of research effort into studying it, and like Dark Matter points out above, there are new ways of doing it that don’t involve the kinds of ruses that the OP describes. That won’t have changed. But now, the researcher can sponsor click-through ads and ask these questions in different ways (among other techniques).
Is it better now? It’s probably more accurate. And less intrusive and deceptive than what the OP describes. So I’m tentatively saying “yes, it’s better now.”Report
To me the question is better for whom. It’s certainly more seamless but I also wonder if it isn’t exacerbating the commodification of everything with negative cultural effects. I mean the great thing about this post is just how quaint the story is compared to things 25 years later. The company played a little trick to get Will’s opinion on pickle jars that one day in 1997 and then he disappeared never to be tracked or heard from again. Nowadays they’re putting a cookie on Will’s phone and mining data from ISPs and other third parties to find out his reaction to any pickle or pickle adjacent content for all eternity in hopes that maybe just maybe they can use that information to nudge saleals up a point or two. The former is kinda funny, while the latter feels downright dystopian.Report
Amazon apparently made it impossible to search for kindle books from a list. Now everything in the Kindle store is recommended by the algorithm. If I want to browse for new history books on Amazon, I have to go into the book department, select history, past 30 days, and order by publication date. And I still get a lot of crap like podcasts or people trying to make money by republishing books in the public domain and literature marketed as history. This is a very recent change that seems to have started in December 2022 and I hate it.Report
That sounds terrible.Report
It is terrible. I guess Amazon did it because it works for the vast majority of their customers but it sucks for people with more obscure tastes who want to brose.Report
“Brose” is what authors like Hemingway and Salinger write.Report
You are greatly underestimating how intrusive it’s gotten.
Companies understand that your buying is pretty much set in stone, i.e. what you buy this week will be the same as last week.
However, there are times where your spending habits become fluid for a short period of time. Pregnancy is one of the big examples. Thus there is a LOT of value to knowing who is pregnant before everyone else does.
Target put together an AI app which reviews the 20+ products associated with pregnancy. Not diapers, if they’re buying diapers then it’s too late. Things like vitamins and a bunch of “normal” stuff which if taken collectively mean something. They could identify a newly pregnant woman.
They ran into problems sending baby related ads to women who hadn’t announced it. This seemed intrusive and offensive. And the parents of a pregnant teen who don’t know she’s pregnant could think Target was encouraging her to be pregnant.
Their solution was to put the baby related ads next to ads for tires and chainsaw blades. If the ads look random then people don’t get offended.
This was 10-20 years ago, if Target could do it then, ALL OF THEM can do it now.Report
Believe me, I know all about it. My take is that it is still more a combination of intrusive and blunt rather than intrusive and smart, but that it’s getting smarter all the time.Report
If a psych department was doing this on students, would this have made it past the ethics board?Report
As a student, you can opt-out of “deceptive” experiments. I didn’t because they’re cooler.
So imho it would have made it past the ethics board. Now they would have explained what they were really doing and why after the fact so there’s that.Report