Beverly Milligan won several prestigious awards for developed closed captioning to enable people with a hearing disability to enjoy television. Her inspiration was her mother who was deaf.

Several years later in 2000, Milligan gained a license from the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) for Canada's first interactive market research channel. A respondent would be able to test TV commercial, movie endings and products from the comfort of their own chair at home.

Milligan's company, ResponseTV, would sell access to the platform to market research companies and consultants for $50,000 per project.

On Milligan's behalf, your professor (Davidson) assembled an advisory group of market research professionals representing both the buyer-side and supplier-side, and included two highly regarded experts in statistics and survey sampling.

Milligan's game-plan was to compile a database of 50,000 respondents by giving away hats and T-shirts outside of busy locations such as Union Station in Toronto. The consensus of the advisory group was, "You can't draw a random sample from a pool that was not a representative random sample". Another obstacle was ResponseTV's gigantic fee; in 2021, a $335 annual subscription to Survey Monkey provides comparable tools to ResponseTV's intended offering in 2000.

• Suppose you are in a current-day meeting with the same people comprised the ResponseTV advisory group. Discuss the merits of surveying people via social media relative to random digit dialing and IPSOS' online survey panel.