Lead Gen is the root of all evil

I have seen thousands of complaints about hundreds of different scams used by Lead Gen companies to recruit people into survey panels, and based on this I contend that Lead Gen is the root of all evil in MR. Lead Gen is also the warning sign that can point us back to the path of righteousness, if we start paying attention to what it's trying to tell us.

We (survey panel companies) don't know how to find sufficient numbers of online panelists by ourselves, and many of us don't know much about online, period. So we go to ad:tech and other similar trade shows, where Lead Gen sales-folk wine & dine us and tell us they can deliver millions of eager leads for pennies apiece. Problem solved! We go back to our offices, kick our feet up and pat each other on the back for a job well done.

We are addicted to Lead Gen, but how much do we really know about Lead Gen? How many of us have followed all the various paths that lead into our panels? Here are just a few of my observations, to get the conversation started.

1. Those annoying pop-ups/banners/co-reg/[insert almost any type of online annoyance] ... that's your Lead Gen dollars at work.
2. Lead Gen offers lead to sites that make false promises (like this, and this, or this), but once the visitor registers it turns out to be a scam.
3. Some Lead Gen sites even make the visitor pay $50!!! for a list of survey companies by promising they can make hundreds or thousands of dollars a week doing surveys.
4. Once they have the person's information they sell it to all the other Lead Gen sites and the poor user is swamped with piles of spam.

This should lead us to some startling conclusions, but for obvious reasons it's taboo to talk about this in MR circles.

1. Only the most guilable and naive web users fall for these scams.
2. By the time we register a panelist, they have already had a negative experience they associate with being on the panel. Not the best way to start a long term relationship.
3. Our panels, ALL OF THEM, are built from the same pool of scam victims whose only motivation is the desire to achieve material gain by doing surveys.
4. Do we really think any of these people care about our surveys enough to answer honestly?
5. Every day that passes, the web user community is getting wiser to these tricks. They've already pressed the flush lever and the Lead Gen model has been swirling around the toilet bowl for so long it can't stay afloat much longer.
6. We have no access to real people or their opinions, we don't want to admit this is true, and we don't know what to do about it.

We can't stop the world and tell it to wait until we find solutions for these problems, but we can start by admitting to ourselves that the problems are real and giving ourselves permissions to talk about them. There are people in our organizations with great ideas, but they are afraid to speak up. The fear of criticism, rejection, termination, and the institutuonal resistance to change is crippling innovation. We have to eliminate fear to enable creativity. New ideas will  lead to new solutions. Yes we can!