A simple to use and understand product that is also easy to create is like a god-send.

Your Prospects and Customers can easily buy it without having to spend too much time figuring out what it is that you’re trying to sell.

It’s a good thing for you because it’s very easy for you to create that product for them too.

Take the “American Idol” singing competition (it’s a “business” for its producers), for example.

It’s a singing contest, and the winner is determined by the number of SMS votes that he/she has received, with the contestant having the lowest number of votes being booted out at the end of each episode.

Simple. Easy. And a super-hit.

If you were producing this program, all you need to do is to determine the format of the competition (how many songs, how long for each song, how many to start off with, etc), decide how many judges would participate, decide who they are to be, decide the date and venues for the auditions, set up the phones lines, deal with the network, find the sponsors, and so on.

Those are not rocket-science stuff. There may be many things that need to be done, but they’re simple stuff that anybody with the right experience can do.

And so American Idol began its huge money-making journey and has done so for the past 6 seasons now, with the 7th underway.

Now “American Idol” is a franchise of “Pop Idol” which began in the UK.

Before long, many countries bought the franchise and started having their own “Idol” competition on television. It’s hard to miss the “Idol” phenomenon everywhere you go.

However, because the show itself isn’t difficult to create, it wasn’t long before copycat versions of it started. This has resulted in the “Idol” competition no longer being held with the copycat version taking the spotlight instead, with a different label, different number of judges, different format for the competition, but always ending with SMS votes determining the winner.

Some other countries never bought the franchise, but borrowed the idea and started their own version right from the beginning using all sorts of label except “Idol”.

Simplicity is bad.

(For the “Idol” franchise, that is.)

Sen Ze

P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://www.SenZe.com/business-blog/simplicity/simplicity-is-good.htm

Technorati Tags: simplicity, American Idol, singing competition, copycat business, SMS votes, business competition, business competitors, product creation

(My favorite contestant for the 5 American Idol contests so far is Clay Aiken, by the way.)

Make no mistake about it – American Idol is a business in and of itself – and it’s a HUGE one.

Here’s the bottomline for the organizers of this Talent Show juggernaut.

Over 63.4 MILLION SMS votes were casted in 4 hours to help determine the winner in just the finale alone!

With each SMS costing say 50 cents, the organizers grossed over 30 million dollars in just 4 hours! (I don’t remember how much each vote costs, and I’ve missed most of the episodes this season except for the final, but you can easily do the math.)

(Click on link to see my previous post on SMS Marketing and how you can use SMS to help market your business.)

And that’s not counting all the other millions of SMS votes and the advertising slots that were sold throughout the duration of the series.

Advertisers paid a whopping $700,000 for a 30-second ad on an episode of American Idol this season, week after week. This same 30-second spot cost $1.3 million in the finale just 2 days ago!

American Idol gets up to 35 million+ people tuning in each week – the highest audience ever for any TV show in the history of American television. See some figures here:

American Idol Statistics I

American Idol Statistics II

American Idol is BIG money – there’s no doubt about it.

While it looks deceptively like a simple talent show – it’s a whole lot more than that in reality.

It skillfully incorporates:

1. The background to each contestant’s desire for be the an American Idol

Everybody loves stories and there are plenty of stories to be told behind each contestant’s desire to make it big in the music industry.

This is the extra value on top of the contestants’ own singing and dancing abilities that we get to enjoy watching each week.

2. The hurdles each contestant needs to go through to be heard

The hurdles include brief auditions and nasty, honest remarks by one judge called Simon. Every stinging remark is felt not just by the contestants, but us as well.

For some reason, some of us tend to symphatize with the contestants and some of us love to see them go through it all. This makes every Idol episode a very watchable one for viewers – in addition to the actual talent (or lack of it) of the contestants.

3. The emotional involvement of the audience

We get to determine who becomes the winner with our cellphone. Just a few keystrokes to be sent to a number for our favorite contestant, and we may have determined the future American Idol. It’ll cost us some, but not so much that we feel it’s a waste of money.

4. The results announcement

We all look forward to the results episode to see if our votes made a difference. This increases the program’s mind share in our heads, for the entire duration of the series and in the future.

5. The elimination of the contestants, one by one

Our votes do not only determine the winners. Contestants who don’t get enough votes get booted out. Seeing the elimination happen as a direct result of who we voted for or who we didn’t vote for makes for enthralling viewing.

It’s a wonderful mix that connected with a big number of people looking to be entertained.

Thus TV is no longer just a passive affair. With American Idol, the involvement of the audience is taken way beyond just watching it, to actually being given a chance to determine its outcome in the simplest possible way (through their cellphones), in real time.

This was never made possible on TV before, but just look at what a little bit of creativity can do to enhance the enjoyment of an audience AND make LOTS of extra money at the same time.

This interactivity brings to mind another medium that is naturally so. I’m talking about the Internet and the World Wide Web, of course.

We’ve got instant polls on web sites for as long as I can remember – but not the killer concept that makes it work like American Idol.

There’s also the other problem of tuning in – because unlike TV, there are millions of channels on the Internet for any user to tune into.

Those channels are called web pages.

Each web page is like a channel in that you can only read a single web page at any point in time.

Most web pages are accessible all the time, thus even if everybody is tuned into the same web page, they’re not doing it at the same time.

Some could be reading it right now, and others could be reading it 2 months from now.

There is no “event” for web pages on a regular basis, unlike an American Idol episode which is broadcasted at the same time each week, every week until it ends.

There’s also no real involvement by the Internet user when he’s at a web page apart from getting the information that he wants.

Nor is there a very compelling reason, apart from getting the information or in being entertained, why anybody would want to be at a specific web page all the time, or vote for something, even if it benefits him because doing so will benefit him in the usual way.

There’s simply nothing “extra” that is worth his effort for him to do so.

Even the Idol concept in a modified form found on the web at the Idol Underground web site is not the answer.

So what is?

Stay tuned – I may just provide you with some clues in my next post.

Warm Regards,
Sen Ze
Click Here To Join The Pajamas Revolution Right Now