“It's already a global TV
hit format - but the show must
go on”
An extract from The Financial Times,
May 6 2004, featuring John Hondros.
FremantleMedia's new magic number is 700m. Two weeks ago, the TV
production company passed that total of votes cast by Pop Idol's
audiences in the 29 countries where it makes the love-it-or-hate-it
show.
It's the latest measure of what a global juggernaut the vehicle has
become in the two-and-a-half years since the first Pop Idol started on
ITV, with a remit that now stretches from Iceland to Indonesia and
Canada to Kazakhstan. The worldwide audience has passed 100m, and last
month saw the launch of Indonesian Idol. Next month, it's Malaysian
Idol.
New research on worldwide viewing and voting patterns for the Pop
Idol brand further demonstrates that consumer participation is expanding
across a variety of platforms. In Germany, they phone. In Denmark, they
text. In the US, they're watching the show and browsing the website at
the same time. The UK leads the way in interactive TV voting.
John Hondros, CEO of Radiant, which compiled the voting data for
Fremantle-Media, says: "With brands that become very emotional,
like Idols, people want to be able to access it in different places at
different times in their own way. They might want to get some gossip
about the artists on SMS, or get home and look at the interactive TV
application, or go online when they're at work and look at videos. So
it's the viewer that's saying: 'We want to engage in this brand in a
much wider way'."
How viewers vote in different markets (and the way platform owners
make their money) depends on which media were available. The UK's second
series of Idol was the first in which interactive TV participation was a
factor, accounting for about 5 per cent of the overall poll. Australia
emerges as the world leader in "voting conversion rate", with
half as many voters again as there were viewers for its final. America
leads the way in the proportion of website users who also watched the
final, at nearly 80 per cent.
The kind of heated audience engagement that was once the sole domain
of soap operas was shown again recently on the third series of American
Idol, screened in the UK by ITV2. Voting on the American show (the
second final of which pulled an audience of 38m) takes place either via
IVR (touch-tone telephone voting) or on SMS, via AT&T.
Black vocalist Jennifer Hudson, favourite to win her heat two weeks
ago, instead came last, leading to accusations of racism and a steward's
inquiry citing a storm in the Midwest that led to a power outage and may
have impaired voting.
The next step for interactive shows in the UK must surely be an
accentuation in online activity. "The way Americans tend to watch
television is that they have the internet on in the background,"
says Hondros. "In the UK that tends not to be the case, although
it's becoming more so.
"If you have a very elaborate, content-rich Idols website as in
the US, it's something you [can use] to provide an additional element to
the programme. In the UK, it's used more as a support site."
For a copy of the full article, please contact john@radiant-digital.com
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