Cross-posted at my marketing blog, Doxagle
The world's biggest focus group
As American Idol winds down its season tonight and bids adieu to its most formidable long-running participant, this is a great opportunity to put the spotlight on the show and what it can teach us about social media. AI actually predates what we’ve come to think of as social media by several years, but its overwhelming success is founded on many of the same principles that govern brand marketers every day.
Every week the viewers of American Idol comprise the world’s largest product development focus group. While it’s easy to focus on it as a Survivor-style game show, it can easily be forgotten that AI’s real purpose each season is to discover and groom a new pop artist for the show’s owner, which just happens to be an entertainment conglomerate. Sure, the judges will try to guide audience response, but AI fans can name numerous occasions when the vote didn’t go the way the judges wanted
The audience’s buy-in is another peculiar element of the show. By encouraging participation, the audience has an emotional stake in the winning product before it even launches. What marketer wouldn’t love that? The product (in the form of a pop singer’s debut album) arrives mere months after the show’s finale with little risk to the record company, certainly compared to sending out A&R people meant to guess what The Next Big Thing might be.
There are also inherent danger in letting the audience take control. For me, the ost frustrating aspect of reality competition shows is the lack of clear rules to the game. Without standards or ideals to apply, the audience – and sometimes the judges – can become confused over what exactly they are judging, especially for something as qualitative as ‘pop stardom quotient.’
The result can be a mess: sometimes ingenius in its preferences (Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood), other times selecting dud winners that offered only short-term satisfaction (Ruben Studdard, Taylor Hicks). It’s the noisy American polity celebrated by DeToqueville writ large.
That’s appropriate for something called American Idol. Is it right for your product?
Originally released in 1967, The Who Sell Out received the Deluxe Edition reissue treatment earlier this year – and it could not have come at a more prescient moment. As the music industry’s revenue continues to fall and fall and fall, some of the cleverer music marketers are seeking new ways to promote their artists and even create new revenue streams from them. Who knew that a psychedelic classic from 1967 would provide the template?
Of course that’s all performed as a sly joke. But recent events have brought product placement in pop songs into the spotlight as a legitimate brand-builder. Most notably Chris Brown’s “Forever” was 
Last Friday, my friend Dennis took me down to the parking lot of the HP Pavilion to check out The Roots. Actually, that’s not quite right. It was the 
I guess I have to give credit to The Roots for seizing the opportunity to go where the money and the audience are. This was the second time I’d seen them at a presumably poorly-paying festival situation, the first being when they played the “Other Stage” at Moby’s tour several years ago. (Remember Moby, anyone?) Nevertheless, it was surprising to see them doing their conscious-hip-hop-meets-The-Meters thing surrounded by 
