Pet Peeve

Just a bit of a kvetch here today. With the updating and revamping of the "shelter" magazines websites comes an invitation to be part of the team--let us send you surveys, and as an interested design fan, you can tell us your likes and dislikes, which will ultimately help us gauge the new trends, and so forth. I'll keep the sites/mags nameless for now. However, lately the surveys seek my response to recent advertisements in the magazines--did you notice them? will they influence your purchase habits? etc. etc. Now I feel like a participant in a marketer's focus group, instead of a valued reader whose thoughts on design were worth gathering. Although I understand that ad pages are the lifeblood of a magazine, I personally skip right over them. I have never (okay, not never, but rarely) torn out an advertisement as inspiration for something I would like to do. So these new surveys are getting irritating. I'm interested in editorial content, not ads, so I wish they'd stop asking me about them. Let the advertisers do this research themselves and ask me about design.