MONTREAL, QC, [MAY 21, 2025] — At the TEDxHECMontréal Conference in 2025, Rodolphe Barrere, CEO and Co-Founder of Potloc, took the stage to deliver a critical message about the data that drives billion-dollar decisions — and the limits the survey industry has quietly accepted for far too long.
In the talk, titled “Data as the Modern World’s Compass”, Barrere urged the survey industry, and those who rely on it, to confront the impossible triangle of survey decisions: “ Better quality, faster delivery, or cheaper cost. You can only pick two.”
The systemic prioritization of cost and speed for decades, he continued, has shaped the way surveys are built, delivered, and consumed, creating shortcuts and ripple effects that extend far beyond market research:
- Opaque sourcing trails, where survey buyers unknowingly receive responses purchased by suppliers from hidden intermediaries Most can’t trace how the data was sourced and verified — and this lower level of scrutiny benefits providers more than buyers.
- Super-respondents, a known class of people and bots gaming the system for rewards, completing 30-100+ surveys a day. Instead of being outright penalized, they’re often accepted as “valid” during data quality checks by vendors eager to hit quotas fast.
- A broken respondent experience, where real people are driven out of the system as vendors focus on economic goals: getting more surveys filled, hitting quotas faster, and saving money on compensation.
And it’s not just the existence of trade-offs that’s the problem, he explained. It’s that buyers aren’t even told whats being compromised.
Per the TEDxHECMontréal theme “Beyond Limits,” Rodolphe urged the industry to break free from its “black box” model — and rebuild trust by treating survey respondents with respect through better experiences and incentives, providing more transparency for buyers around how data is sourced and verified, as well as bringing buyers into the conversations around data quality trade-offs.
Watch the full TEDx talk here, and learn more about TEDxHECMontréal here.
