Portrait of a blogger as a young focus group participant

Recently my dinner was interrupted by an invitation via a telephone solicitor who invited me to take part in an advertising survey. Because I find the number of people in the world who value my opinion is constantly shrinking, I jumped at the chance to share that opinion with someone who cared.

The concept was simple. I agreed to accept a video tape in the mail, watch it and answer some questions in exchange for entering a prize drawing. I'm a pragmatist so I don't see myself winning a prize, but just the fact that I cut the muster for their focus group made me feel special so I said yes. Sure enough within a few days of agreeing to participate, I received my package in the mail from Audience Studies, a marketing research firm in Cincinnati, complete with a VHS tape, some questionnaires and two prize booklets.

It surprised me how explicit the instructions I was to follow were. First I was to go through the green prize book and circle whatever brand of various items I would want to receive as a prize. The booklet contained 17 different categories of household products and pictures of different brands in each. Most of it was crap. I wouldn't have wanted to purchase most of this stuff, much less receive it as a prize. No plasma TVs, wireless gadgets or nubile virgins to be had here. Instead facial moisturizer, scented candles, Mexican dinner kits, fabric softener, peanut butter, tea bags and cereals were all among the things I had to discriminately ponder over and select.

Having no opinion on most of it, I asked Elaine which of these things she'd want to receive. She happily obliged and, to my surprise, had definite preferences when it came to all of these things. Who would have known she preferred Aveeno skin moisturizer over Curel, Noxema, St. Ives or the 22 other brands shown on the page? I didn't even know there were 25 brands of skin moisturizer. Now I understand why I hate being sent to the grocery store. Filling this thing out felt like taking a timed test in school, one for which I was obviously ill-prepared.

I had hoped the fun part of this exercise would be watching the video. That the tape was of a show that according to the instructions "was not new but never appeared on TV" should have clued me in. Turns out it was a pilot for a failed show called Dads starring C. Thomas Howell, Rue Mclanahan, some hey-it's-that-guys and some child actors who, if there is a God, will never find work in television again. Elaine actually recognized a couple of the "actors" as former tertiary recurring faces on Friends.

From watching the program I got the impression the three dads were divorced and their kids all played together and attended the same preschool of which Rue Mclanahan was the director. She put on a German accent for the show which really added nothing to her character but I suppose made her sound less like a Golden Girl. Even still I couldn't stop thinking Why is Blanche Devereaux talking that way? The show sucked dog's ass and the only chance it ever has of seeing actual airtime in my opinion is on the Torture Channel as a tool to coax information out of would-be terrorists. It was that bad. Painful to watch. Through the magic of modern technology the tape erased as it played. Originally I thought this was for research purposes, but now I wonder if it wasn't done at the personal request of C. Thomas Howell. I hurriedly completed the second prize booklet, filled out a questionaire about the show and went to bed.

The following evening I received my anticipated phone call from a tele-drone working at the research agency. She sped through her list of questions as though she had a 30-minute interview to give and was scheduled to clock out in ten. I tried to keep up with her fast-paced strongly disagrees, somewhat disagrees, neither agrees nor disagrees, somewhat agrees, and strongly agrees. It was obvious by her monotone that she couldn't possibly care less about my answers and after ten minutes of having to give one-word responses to the same question rephrased different ways I began to share her enthusiasm. I especially found it tedious that after I answered no to her question regarding whether or not I take a multi-vitamin she went on to ask me what brand of multi-vitamin did I prefer, how often I buy them and whether I or someone else in the household purchases them. Furthermore the whole thing seemed like it was geared toward shaming me for not remembering details about the commercials I saw during the program. Did I mention my dinner was getting cold all this time?

Just when I thought the whole thing was about to come to an end, she instructed me to put the video back in the VCR and watch a commercial before answering yet more questions. When those questions were answered, there was still another commercial to watch. These were both commercials I had seen the previous night but had totally forgotten. After 25 minutes of interrogation I found myself just coming up with shit to say off the top of my head. When asked what I liked about the Chase commercial, I said I liked the bright colors. When asked what I didn't like about the commercial I said the hug scene. How was I supposed to know she was then going to ask me what about the hug scene I didn't like? I said it wasn't genuine; she struggled to hold back her guffaw.

All I'm saying is I better get something out of this besides painful memories and cold shrimp alfredo. Bring on the prizes. Can't you just imagine the fun I could have with $100 worth of Johnsons 24-hour moisturizer and a few sticks of Mazola? Knowing my luck though the whole celebration would be tainted with inescapable images of Rue Mclanahan. If you want to check and see whether or not my margarine fantasy comes true, you can actually view the list of prize recipients at www.audiencestudies.com. Who knows, I just might win.

Do you strongly disagree?

Somewhat disagree?

Neither agree nor disagree?

Somewhat agree?

Or don't give a shit?