PR people waste millions on polls, poll reveals

PR people and media buyers waste millions on creating nonsense polls and surveys, a new poll/survey has revealed.

Despite the hype surrounding many polls and the time and money spent on creating them, fewer than two per cent serve any real practical use, the survey found.

Often, the poll only exists only in order to get the company that sponsored the survey mentioned in the third paragraph of the story, the Ballot International Ltd survey revealed.

Also, while most polls claim to have "found" or "revealed" vague truths about the subject of their survey, since most of the information was already common knowledge, the words are wholly inappropriate, the survey uncovered.

Not only that, but an unhealthy number of surveys feel the need to split anyone involved in the poll's subject into handy pigeonholes that happily fit their client's preconceived notions of how the people involved in the poll's subject behave and think.

In particular, the poll found that those behind formulating polls and surveys can be separated into four basic types:

• Amateur sociologists These people will tend to separate everyone into easily identifiable and targetable boxes, based on a flawed concept of sociology picked up by a skim read of a text book once and avid viewership of daytime TV moan shows.
• Stebos Stands for "states the bleedin obvious". These pollsters, known as Stebos, will spend weeks formulating a plan for how their client can sell more of a product that no one wants to buy and then come out with a poll that makes big play of the most insanely obvious observation. This is usually concealed through the invention of futile acronyms that make people believe they are learning something. Such acronyms must be pronounceable, so liberal insertion of vowels without explanation is often noticeable.
• Class-based patronisers Nearly all middle-class women of ABC1 extraction, these surveyors will revolve a poll around class for no other reason than their own pretensions. In such cases, working class people are required to be mocked, patronised and assumed unable to make a rational decision. Lower middle classes will always want to better themselves and the upper classes are reverently derided and thought to be twits. Middle and upper middle classes are studiously ignored.
• Upside-down mathematicians Seventy-four per cent of pollsters are not upside down mathematicians and so don't try to make a point by flipping every figure on its head in a vain effort to make a bad situation appear as a good one. This sloppy manipulation usually doesn't not end up in a complicated set of double negatives.
• Continuity disorganisers This group, which makes up a third of class-based patronisers, specialise in taking an already useless survey and making it an ambiguous masterpiece in which figures don't add up, assumptions change within the text as the formulator tries to achieve the correct end result and final conclusions are not backed up either by the survey itself or the everyday experience of the people that read the survey.

However, while the survey does provide an insight into those that help create polls, it does not mention that at the end of every survey a small criticism of their own methods is inserted as a safety mechanism and in an effort to appear objective.