Advertising about your weekend
Today’s Daily Mail story in the Herald is unusual, not because it’s a survey done to advertise a company, but because the company of that name in New Zealand is getting a freebie. The story is describes people lying about their boring weekends, and it’s a survey commissioned by Travelodge, the UK budget hotel chain. The hotel company with with the Travelodge brand in this part of the world is, as far as I can tell, not related.
What is notable about the story, which confused me at first when looking across multiple versions in the British media, is that it’s a re-run. Travelodge did the same survey in 2011, on a larger sample. Here’s the Mail story from last time; the Herald escaped it then.
The press release for this year’s survey isn’t up, but if it’s like the 2011 one it won’t give any information about how the survey was conducted, and only reports a few highlights of the results, so if it were about anything important you wouldn’t want to pay attention.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »