Perfect Crowd

John Kearon in Prague

It is a great pleasure to welcome John Kearon (back) to London in Prague.

John is the Founder, CEO & Chief Juicer of BrainJuicer Europe's leading online research agency. John was Ernst & Young's 'Entrepreneur of the Year 2005' and the company's innovative approach to research has garnered a number of awards including 'The Most Innovative Use of IT' and 'Service Business of the Year'.

Most important of all, John is passionate about innovation - innovation of marketing and market research techniques.

The workshop with John will take place on 10th of November at Long Tale Café, Osadní 35, Praha 7. We will start at 10am and we aim to finish at 3pm.

This is the agenda:

• The future of online research, moving beyond "fast and cheap" (10-11am)
  
• Finding and engaging the creative consumers (co-creation and crowdsourcing) (11-12.00pm)
  
• Building communities of interest (12.00-1pm)
  
• Lunch 1.00-1.30pm
  
• Moving from "me" to "we" research - mass ethnography (1.30-2.00pm)
  
• Group excersise: creating real case in Czech Republic where we put to practice the principles of co-creation, crowdsourcing and "we research". We will select 1 or 2 cases at the end and we will put make them happen!
  

Looking forward to see you in Long Tale Café on the 10th of November!

Here is a link for registration: http://www.londynvpraze.cz/registrace/lip/

If you want to know more or would like to register please write to us on info@londynvpraze.cz or call us at +420 773 552 225.

The power of divergence

Some of the large market research departments on the client side have gone through yet another round of soul-searching and introspection recently. Some have emerged with a new vision for the function, a vision that points out the necessity of a return to rigorous measurements and discipline and a return to traditional market research methodologies.

 

It seems that we have been misled in recent years by left-wing radicals who infiltrated the research departments and led us astray to extremes such as researchers sitting down in a circle with consumers, holding hands and chanting while under the influence of drugs and hypnosis; and even worse – they taught us to rely on our gut feel and intuition. Now, in the time of economic turmoil, we must come back to reason, numbers and indices.

 

The right-wing approach which calls for rigorous measurements would have been completely justified if events in the world moved in linear fashion. But it is not so. We can rigorously apply BASES volumetrics and feel good about the predicted 1,356 thousand tons of soap that we will sell in market X next year but we already know that this will not happen because of earthquakes, competitors, swine flu and people being what they are, (namely, irrational creatures) to name a few amongst thousands of variables.

 

Nonetheless, the desire to converge on one number that would offer an answer to complex questions is stronger than common sense. 

 

Good enough

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the difference between convergence and divergence tests for measuring individual success. According to Gladwell, intelligence matters but only to a point – in terms of future success it doesn't really matter if my IQ score is 125 or 135 – at some point it simply becomes ‘good enough’. 

 

"If intelligence matters only up to a point, then past that point, other things – things that have nothing to do with intelligence – must start to matter more." [Outliers, p. 86]

 

‘The other thing’ is creativity. And so far the best possible measure for creativity are divergence tests which measure the ability to produce new ideas by seeing new associations between existing and seemingly unconnected concepts. Some innovators in the field of market research, such as John Kearon, are already using divergence techniques to identify creative consumers who are then invited into a process of co-creation.

 

This ability to uncover associations and connection is close to a definition of creativity. And it is a desperately needed ability in market research if it wants to play serious role in delivering innovation: in term of product and communication for its client and also in terms of new research techniques and tools. 

 

Convergence is useful up to a point but its importance in research is clearly overrated. Insight, new ideas and innovations are delivered through divergence: through interdisciplinary approaches that illuminate a variety of possibilities and solutions. 

(written for the September issue of the Research World)

Third pill

Slavoj Zizek : Lacanian-Marxist, philosopher, "Elvis of cultural theory" and the greatest contemporary Eastern-European thinker:

 

In the Matrix, Morpheus gives Neo choice between red pill that would reveal the truth of the “Matrix” and a blue pill that would let him go back to the illusion. Zizek comes in at this point and expresses the need for a third pill. “What is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself.”

The influence of illusion - fiction, movies, advertising, brands - over our daily lives is much stronger than the influence of the non-symbolic (and inaccesible) reality.  Illusion - and movies most of all - says Zizek, is what teaches us how to desire...Clearly, the task of (marketing) research is to tackle directly the reality of illusion rather than trying to get to it through interrogation of consumers. We need the third pill. 

The Innovation Trap

I have written the "Innovation trap" as an article for the October issue of the  Research World .  I received a number of  emails from people (agency and client side) who read it and who are also tired by the frentic (and usually pointless) search for new research methodologies.  "However", asks one of the emails, "where is the money in pure "consumer understanding?"  Great question. I am thinking about it, discussing it with people around me.  What do you think?  

Meanwhile, here is the article:

Researchers need to focus on understanding people instead of constantly inventing ‘new’ methodologies.

 I have spent the last ten years on the client side, where innovation and growth go hand-in-hand. Unilever or any other manufacturer innovates in order to grow its brand’s share, turnover and profit. The research industry has learned from its clients and has adopted this model: it measures its growth in value terms and  attributes a large portion of its growth to innovation of market research techniques.

 If innovation is at the heart of the research business, we should all frantically search for new ways of doing research. It is a seductive proposition for any creative researcher. However, I believe that the search for research innovations is a dangerous trap into which most of us have fallen.

 Market research is about understanding people and why they do what they do. Unfortunately, typical innovations in research obscure this understanding because they generate growth through developing research tools that can be sold quickly and in great volume. Again, it is exactly what the manufacturer does when selling its innovations.

 For instance, we might develop a new toothbrush designed for brushing the tongue. We know that the consumer might not have a genuine need for tongue brushing but we are smart enough to create the need. Rather than selling a product we are selling a myth.

 The great myth

What is the myth that market research sells to its consumers – the research buyers? The key myth is that of certainty and control over a world that is completely chaotic and unpredictable. Fear of the chaos out there has forced us – on the client side – into a make-believe world of benchmarks, persuasion scores and scales designed to measure emotions (the latest hype). We have subjected consumers to our reality of tongue-brushing while we are ourselves subjected to the reality of the major research agencies.

 A few years ago, the market research function on the client side tried to break free from the prison of benchmarks and scales. It re-branded itself and market researchers became insight managers. We promised to gather insight, transmit knowledge and educate our clients. If we had succeeded in this transformation, there would be less market research and more educated clients acting on gut feelings. The growth of the research industry would have halted as a result.

 Instead, the industry is thriving and its growth signifies our failure on the client side to listen to our intuition, take risks and come up with truly disruptive product innovation that would genuinely surprise and delight consumers.

 True research is about understanding people. And genuine understanding of people comes from years of learning, experience and true intuition. It comes down to talented individuals who are semioticians, ethnographers, and great qualitative researchers. These are the people whose insights add tremendous value to the business and who are able to energise and guide clients.

 I have a lot of respect for people who have established small agencies to fight the big players. The problem is that they soon adopt the structures of the large agencies and start their own frantic search for fast-moving research products. This seems to be the only way for a research agency to grow in size: they create the need for a new, high-tech, silver-methodology that will deliver pre-packaged ideas for innovations to clients' desktops.

 It used to be hard to challenge the agency system as agencies owned the necessary technical tools. Then came the internet revolution and today the tools that researchers need are either already out there or are being developed – not by research agencies but by the likes of Google, Facebook or Twitter.

 Because of this, there is no need for new innovative research methodologies. The true job to be done consists of unlearning, of throwing the obsolete research tool sets away. Instead of building new methodologies, we should build networks of creative people who can work together and truly help us to understand the world’s people and cultures.

Esomar Innovate Conference, Copenhagen (2 out 2)

I write this partly as a response to the comment from Matt Hart - and I will come back to Matt's points shortly.

I did two presentations at the Esomar Innovate conference in Copenhagen - one with Evert Bos from Brainjuicer and the second with Andrew Needham of Face. I did the second presentation on behalf of Ana Medeiros,  my colleague in Unilever. Ana works closely with Andrew on the co-creation for Axe and she has done great job driving and promoting co-creation within Unilever.  Here are the 2 presentations (Andrew Needham and John Kearon have kindly agreed to publish the presentations on this blog):

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Both methodologies - Brainjuicer's creative 6-ers and the approach of Face - have at their heart co-creation of new ideas/concepts with people  (so-called creative consumers) and each of them are advocating a completely different approach.

Lets try to explore some aspects of the two approaches while looking at the questions raised by Matt:

Recruiting and profiling: Brainjuicer uses the screener for "creatives", described in the presentation.  Similar screener is used in case of the Supergroups (used by Márta for the co-creation on Tic Tac).  The " Stuffed Toy Elephant question" (see slide 15 of the Brainjuicer presentation) is one the key question for recruitment of creatives for both Brainjuicer creatives and the Supergroupers.

Educating the respondents: Face has their panel of consumers (Headbox) from which they draw creative consumers.  These consumers are often young designers/students of marketing and I think that this is a great advantage, i.e. rather than being dependent (only) on a questionnaire we can hire young people who are not only creative and bright but also educated in our field. (It becomes much easier to explain to them what the brands stands for,  what are the objectives etc.)

We worked with the young creative consumers on Axe/Lynx and we had long debates about whether to use older creative consumers when co-creating ideas for more "older" brands.  My feeling is that the offline and intense co-creation sessions are more suited to younger people who already know a bit about advertsing, design and marketing. Márta and her team used this approach for the work on the site for Tic Tac  - they have recruited young guys to design a site for middle aged people.

The creative consumers recruited by Brainjuicer create ideas online and in isolation. I think that the Brainjuicer approach is most useful when one needs to generate many ideas in a short time.  The ideas from the Brainjuicer creative 6-ers will come out in rough shapes and, in most cases,  will need to be fine tuned in an offline session. The ideas for deodorants (described in the presentation for Esomar) that were generated by the creative 6-ers  became one of the key sources for the Wildfire project (which is a c0-creation process).

Incentives:  I think that we have used the right mixture of incentives for the people who work on the new Axe variant (it is described in the Face presentation). That mixture included money but was not about money only - we had to create an engaging environment for the consumers to work in,  provide a real experience of learning and doing, take them seriously and share with them the final results of the co-creation (the finished product or advertising).

Esomar Innovate Conference, Copenhagen (1 of 2)

I attended the Esomar Innovate Conference in Copenhagen  (16-18 June) but I wasn't able to see all the presentations. Here is a handful of thoughts and observations about the bits I did see:

* The giant step that market research could take to help innovation everywhere hasn't yet happened. We're still waiting for the moment when the representatives of the big research factories arrive on  stage and acknowledge that they are running on empty, that it is becoming harder for them to sell the dream of certainty even to the weakest of clients and,  that after helping to deliver mediocre products and communication and helping to kill the many dreams of enthusiastic brand managers, planners  and creatives, they are closing their factories down.

* The majority of speakers came from the UK, western Europe and the US. The majority of people in the audience came from the developing world.  Either there is nothing very innovative happening in the developing world or those of us from the developing world cannot write very good papers (the 20-page-long variety that Esomar requires for entry).  My feeling is that the problem is with the papers themselves and the dominant, Western rules of discourse.  The people who judge the papers are from the West and they will naturally prefer a style and thinking process that is close to their own style and thinking.  The problem with the Esomar papers is similar to the problems with most of research reports: they tend to get out of hand and dilute insights and issues in an avalanche of words.

* Gregg Fraley was the keynote speaker and  I really enjoyed his speech  while I was watching it. I am trying to remember now what he was talking about. I recall a picture of the iPod. And a picture of Steve Jobs.  And a slide saying "Starbucks is dead".  Watching the speech was  like watching a good Hollywood movie - enjoyable but without providing a lasting experience that could really touch your life.

*The presentation of Márta Hoffman (RI, Hungary) and István Kozári (Initiative) was the highlight of the conference for me, and and not just because it was the only presentation from the developing world.

 

In a nutshell, Márta and István have changed the way in which Tic Tac connects with consumers online in Hungary.  In the past Tic Tac had a reasonably good but very static site. The site celebrated the brand but was not particularly useful for consumers.  Márta and her agency found gifted young people and co-created with them a concept for new online community for Tic Tac. 

The community is based on a strong insight into Hungarian society (not only) that the  research  uncovered and that lead to the "Networks of Favours" idea:

   

The  "Network of Favours"  is the concept for the Tic Tac community. People join the site to exchange little favours : walking a dog, watering plants, and such things. 

It ticks several boxes:

1. It is useful to people and doesn't celebrate the glory of the brand (and being useful is a must if a brand wants to join an online conversation);
2. The scope is  bigger and more important to people than the category and related territories e.g. "freshness", and;
3. It is the right territory for Tic Tac.

The role of research in the development of the community was crucial: Márta and her agency found the right people to co-create with. They didn't just utilize creative consumers but included people from agencies and the client's company. They created an engaging environment for them. They facilitated,  moderated and interpreted the sessions in an informed way that was  in-line with the thinking on the brand. All of this led to the insight, ideas and real results.  And it was fast and affordable. This is what good research should do.

For everything else (technical innovations in market research) there is Google and Facebook. Ironically, it seems easier for the researchers lacking the intuition needed for doing the research job properly to displace the issue and create the need for a new, high-tech, silver bullet research methodology that will deliver pre-packaged ideas for innovations to clients' desktops.

I think that we need more case studies like the one on Tic Tac to dispel the "silver bullet" myth.

I work on Sure/Rexona and one of our key tasks at the moment is to find a way for the brand to join (get a permission to join)  the relevant conversations that are already taking place, online and off. The case that Márta and István presented was an inspiration for me, worth much more than the general discussions about innovation (with inevitable calls to actions, figures of percentages of innovations failing in the market and pictures of  iPods and Steve Jobs).

Here is the presentation that Marta has kindly shared with me:

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(I have copied the photo of Márta and István from Henrik Hall's article.)

About Russia and the "Women go home" campaign

I feel as if I'm traveling back in time when I visit Russia, leaving the West with its citizens turned into consumers, its detachment,  irony and spiritual void and entering Russia, the soulful, pre-ironic land of material impoverishment.

I have traveled to Russia repeatedly the past seven years. Most of the business that we do in Russia is with women. Russian women are responsible for the boom in FMCG there,  buying into the dreams and promises of the great Western brands.

Often the dreams that brands are made of function as compensation for the hardship that women in Russia have to endure. They bear the double burden of family and work with fatalism, not expecting much from the men who might already be gone or/and drunk or dead.

The communist "engineers of human souls" realized a few decades ago that  birth rates are falling rapidly in the Soviet Union. The communist leaders did their bit of research and concluded that it was the participation of Soviet women in the workforce that led to the "masculinization" of women and hence to falling birth rates.  The official propaganda came up with the "women go home" campaign, encouraging women to become more feminine, submissive and tender. According to some Soviet psychologists,  the masculinization of women "had caused the feminization of men, wounding the men's self esteem, causing them to become idle and demoralized." (Cited in "Femininity and Double Burden) This is a tragically wonderful example of transfer of the guilt for impotence (both literally and figuratively speaking) from men to women.

The target for the "women go home" campaign were clearly men, who felt empowered by the campaign's goal - the subordination of women. In reality, the women were very much at home already as they still are today. The universe of Russian women begins and ends at home: women define themselves through home, family and interpersonal relationships. While many men are losers and drunks and living with them is hard, life without men seem even harder. No man equals no family  and "having a family" is the ultimate goal for many Russian women. On a more practical level, it is almost impossible to survive in Russia as a single mother. Single-mother families account for most of the poor households in Russia because of: a) the low individual income of single mothers;  b) their inability to compete with men on the labor market; and, c) the insufficient amount of private and public transfers to compensate for the absence of the second income source in the family. The need - to get and keep men - has been exploited by manufacturers and brands in Russia. Here is one of the crudest example (I have showed this ad already here but it is worth seeing again).

The need to appear feminine and attractive under any circumstances have been long internalized by Russian women. "Beauty requires sacrifice" and the sacrifice is performed daily: a typical Russian women would never leave her house - even to go shopping to a corner store - without a make up. They would be horrified if they could see some of the women in London who do their make-up on the morning trains to work, totally oblivious of the other passengers, males or females. Russian women are all but oblivious to the gaze of the others. The "locus of control" is not located within the free individual but with the community outside of oneself (which implies less freedom and individualism in the Western sense but  also less loneliness and alienation).

Perfect beauty in Russia involves a touch of mystery and enigma. The mystery comes from inside and is connected with the notion of "inner beauty" and "soul" - which are still so important in Russia. In relation to men, it is the mystery that is supposed to constantly re-fuel and renew men's desire. There is an unconscious fear on part of some women, that if a man "sees through a woman" he loses interest in her.

Times are changing, even in Russia. Changes are happening the fastest in Moscow, while things are slow in the provinces. It is in the provinces where time seems frozen. There are typical small towns full of older ladies (most of the men are dead) walking slowly along the empty playgrounds (the birth rates continue falling in the post-communist times). There is no Ikea furniture inside of the apartments in the province (there are Ikeas in Moscow already); their chairs and tables are old, dark - and real. The sense of authenticity is strong, coming from the things that have been touched and used for years, from the books on the shelves (yes, the Russian classics) that were read, experienced and "re-lived" and from the sense of fatalistic reconciliation with life itself.   

Whatever little I have learned about her - the Russian woman - I learned by talking to them in their kitchens, snooping around their living rooms and bathrooms. I also learned a lot from the "perfect crowd" of great researchers, sociologists and other experts that I have the privilege to meet and work with in Russia.   

Source: "Feminity and the Double Burden: Dialogues on the Socialization of Russian Daughters into Womanhood",  Natalia Roudakova and Deborah S. Ballard-Reisch

Freemium and market research

"The freemium business model works by offering basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features" (Wikipedia).   By letting the basic service go for free  we let people use, taste and experience the brand,  turn them into fans and then trade them up to premium service. Skype, Second life or the latest albums of Prince and Radiohead are the most famous examples of freemium.  I know quite a few people who traded up to premium in case of Radiohead latest album, buying the £40 pack, containing the CD, vinyl and artworks...

What is the £40 unexpected premium in market research? It is easier to define the basic service first. Data, charts, even glossy PowerPoint charts are the basic things. Data are becoming a commodity and market research should make data available now when there is still interest in it.  Data should be free or available at a low cost. 

The basic in market research industry still cost a lot though.  Market research is still growing mainly through the sales of commodities - data, charts, cross-tabs, benchmarks and focus groups.  Similar to tobacco companies, the traditional market research is cashing on ignorance of its consumers: some of the old research methods are best sellers in developing markets such as Eastern Europe where the confidence and expertise of clients is low.

Market research has re-branded itself in recent years  and market researchers became insight managers - they promised to gather insight, transmit knowledge and educate their clients. If we had succeeded in this transformation there would be less market research and more educated
clients acting on gut feel. Isn't the true goal of market research/market insight to obliterate data gathering, to throw it away like a person with broken leg throws away crutches when the leg is heeled? Well, the crutches are not flying away as yet.

It is not for lack of intelligence in the market research industry.  There is lots of great thinking and really interesting papers talking about the need to understand emotions and metaphors, about the unconsciousness, neuroscience or anthropology.  I read these papers with interest until the almost inevitable anticlimax (it always comes at the end) when this great thinking is usually transformed into something very small, into implications and execution for market research. The results are (usually)  re-dressed but still the old and mundane ways of data gathering,  multiple-choice questions with pictures or photos or  scales of different colors.  These are pretty good ways for engaging  consumers in filling the questionnaires but they don't seem to be worth the great efforts.

This approach (great thinking, mundane executions) often works for the research buyer.  We, on the client side, can boost our image of "progressive researchers" by buying the latest research gadget that is just the old mechanistic test re-dressed to look cool... I don't think that there is a need to radically innovate ad tests, concept tests etc. - they are good enough (meaning not that good at all)  for what they are designed for, that is, to help us in case our judgment is failing us and to be thrown away when we know more.  It is the  basic of market research and it should go free (OK, it should be cheaper, one should be able to do such test in a couple of days for a couple of hundred euros).   

What is the premium then, the £40 goodie bag? The junior researcher sent by the senior researcher to the client to read from a shadow on the wall that 35% is more than 20%? Nope. The reports from four focus groups that always mysteriously fit to 50 slides? I don't think so.

I talked about this over a coffee with John Kearon a couple of months ago.  "Meaning," said John, "meaning is the £40 goodie bag".  Meaning, understanding of people, products, brands and the  way people, products and brands interact is the premium.  It sounds obvious because so much lip service has been paid to it but the money is still elsewhere - with the basics.

Things are changing, even in market research.  Those of us who have seen one (or two) political systems crumbling down in our lifetime can't be fooled by talk about "growth and great opportunities," such talk is often masking  fear, agony and the beginning of an end .  Market research will change radically. The global market research agencies of the future  - Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter - will take care of the data. 

The network of creative experts will take care of the meaning.

Charlie vs. Dead White Men

Charlie has been born out of web 2.0, in 2007. Ten years before Charlie, in 1997, Richard Barbrook says "that the rapid spread of personal computing and now the Net are the technological expressions of the desire of many people to escape from the petty controls of the shopfloor and the office". He continues: “Despite the insecurity of short-term contracts, they want to recover the independence of craft labour which was lost during the process of industrialisation. Because of rapid technological innovation, skilled workers within the hypermedia and computing industries are precisely those best able to assert this desire for autonomy”.

Ten years later Web 2.0 seemed to be the yellow brick road leading off from the path of the boredom of the shopfloor and the office. And not just for those working within the hypermedia and computing industries but for the many researchers, account people, planners working in agencies named after Dead White Men. These men may have originally had strong visions, but these visions aren't necessarily shared by people working in agencies today.

Let’s take the market research industry as an example. Many creative and entrepreneurial researchers began leaving big research agencies before Web 2.0.  After leaving they tried to establish smaller versions of big agencies, using the same hierarchies and structures but with fewer people. Eventually, they started to send their junior people to clients for presentations while sitting back and supervising and perhaps retiring all together. Structures and people – whether in the field department or the coding department – were needed to get jobs done.

Then along came Web 2.0 and the word is spreading that the emperor really is “naked:” the market research industry might not be much of an industry any more. Who needs a field department when there are global online research panels or even Facebook? Who needs the latest breakthrough research concept testing methodology when you can work with creative people, not on a concept test, but on developing a real product or service?

We (the clients) need creative people (complete with faces, talent and knowladge) not market research agencies. We are already following the good people, to their own agencies and we will continue to follow them even if they move from one big agency named after a dead guy to another agency named after two dead guys. This is the push. The pull is the desire for autonomy, the need to be free and fulfill one's own vision  – and the need for genuine collaboration with other people.

It is less lonely out there than it used to be. Web 2.0 connects the creative researchers online and builds connections that can be then taken off-line, whether to a café or a workshop. As it turns out, collaboration and friendship can replace structures and hierarchies. 

Online research panels vs. social networks

There is a lot of discussion these days in the research community about incentives (points, money, coupons, possibility to see the results of surveys etc.) for respondents participating in online research panels. I think that the most interesting alternative would be the possibility for a respondent to take her incentives, quit her participation in an online research panel and join a social network instead.

The transition from an online research panel to a social network is similar to the transtion from a totalitarian society to a true democracy - this is how I see it, with my Eastern European mindset. Online research panel are built top down. Respondents are neatly segmented and kept in their cells to emerge only to do the tedious tasks of checking boxes in research questionnaires. Then they collect their wages and go back to their isolated cells. Misbehaving, dissident respondents are thrown out of the panel.

Social networks are built from the bottom up by individuals with faces and personalities. People aren’t paid to join social networks – they do it because they want to participate.

Facebook, one of the largest and most successful social networks, has recently launched their own polls, enabling anyone to do her own research. At the moment, the design of the research is very narrow: it is possible to create one closed-ended question per poll with a maximum of five answers. The site charges for the research depending on how quickly the results are provided and how large the sample size.

The polls maybe simplistic, but it’s only the beginning... I also think that the best research on Facebook in the future probably won’t be polling but rather research done with groups, those small communities built around common passions and interests. There is no charge for the researcher to join, participate and listen. However, one has to ask what a researcher could charge a client for such work.

Let’s consider two scenarios for the future. In the first, online research panels become more important in the future as they offer a two-fold incentive to respondents – more money and the means to participate and see the results of the surveys. In the second, online panels will gradually disappear to be replaced by social networks which will offer research as an added product to generate revenues, similar to the way that advertising is now added to social networks.

If I had to bet money on one of these scenarios, I'd put my money on the side of the social networks

I tried to do my own poll on Facebook  yesterday, asking the Russians on Facebook question about major religion in Russia in 2100.

This is the intro screen.  You can then type in your question plus 5 answers and pay for the survey:

Once you have paid (this poll cost me $11), your poll goes live and you can start checking the progress:

I have received the results (100 completes) in about 8 hours: