Cute non-threatening boys vs independent single mom. Guess who wins?

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 ingenious 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?

Quaker Oats, one of America’s great venerable supermarket products, staged a complete relaunch of its brand over the last two months.  The campaign has won kudos both for its general positivity in these otherwise dark times – sick of bailout-themed ads yet? – but also for the way that it reframes oats as a “power food.”  That is indeed a new, compelling USP for the brand and subtly introduces the idea of value as a ‘bang for the buck’ food. 

A closer look shows something else: a new emphasis on ‘bang for the buck’ marketing.  By bringing all of its product lines under a single campaign, however big or expensive, Quaker must be saving here, there and everywhere on its promotional and internal costs.  The most obvious way is the now-gone requirement to discretely support each of its panoply of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats, Quaker Quick Oats, Quaker Instant Oatmeal, Quaker Oatmeal Squares and on & on.  It also means potential reductions in tmarketing personnel, in-store marketing, graphic staff (fewer executions), agency support, and so forth.  One wonders once the initial advertising launch blast is over with where the savings will go: into the product (reaching consumers) or simply as a hedge against falling revenue.  

Either way Quaker looks smart.  The company gets a new convincing USP out there, it cuts costs and – as James Surowiecki points out in this week’s New Yorker – finds a way to keep innovating and marketing in the throes of the recession. 

…a major study, by the Strategic Planning Institute, of corporate behavior during the past thirty years found that reducing ad spending during recessions did improve companies’ return on capital. It also meant, though, that they grew less quickly in the years following recessions than more free-spending competitors did.

The Quaker Oats campaign may be a bellwether for the overall marketing economy. As long as we see only one campaign for all its many products – I count 30 currently on its web site – we’ll know that US brands are still in cost-cutting mode.  But when the company starts to support its individual brand lines again – especially though general advertising, not just couponing and in-store marketing – then we can surmise that it’s sufficiently confident that spending is rising again.