Belligerati

A friend of the BlueEyedGirl got tickets in the mail from a company that offered you an evening with the “sole purpose of testing material being considered for broadcast. By participating in the Television Preview screening event, you have the opportunity to directly influence what you may see on television in the future.” However, after we went, I now know that Television Preview is grossly misleading at best and at worst a scam. You get to a hotel indicated on the tickets, and a man in a suit collects tickets. You sit down and fill out books filled with consumer goods, where in a variety of categories you are asked to indicate your preferred brands so that if you win one of the evenings prizes you might be sent a package of your favorite groceries. Then you proceed to watch two hours of pilots, including commercials, which they claim makes it as much as possible like your home viewing experience. which they claim is “what the networks have asked them to do”. But that’s not the game. The real game is the commercials. They pay most people exactly nothing to sit through commercials, and get their opinions on miles of brand information. Even if they don’t have a way of tying it back to your name and address, which they may not (I looked for unique identifiers on the surveys and didn’t find anything), they still show you a pair of terrible pilots form the early 1990s under the false pretense that what you say about the television programs matter. The BlueEyedGirl and her friend didn’t really do their homework on this except to check that it wasn’t a time-share scam, but when we got home we were stunned at all the websites complaining about this company.
My recommendation is to not go to this if they invite you. It was misleading, stupid, and most of the commercials and both of the pilots where horrible. Of if you really want mess with them, go and fill out crazy answers, making their data useless.