Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [18]
It was, and is, a depressingly true-to-life example of what’s going on today in TV commercials. There’s no originality out there—it’s too risky. Uncreative companies are simply imitating other uncreative companies. In the end, everyone’s a loser because we as TV viewers can’t tell one brand from the next. We watch commercial after commercial, but the only thing we’re left with, if they’ve registered in our memories at all, is the image of a shiny, anonymous car and a handful of dust.
ON JUNE 11, 2002, a popular British TV show known as Pop Idol made the transatlantic crossing to the United States, and in its retitled debut as American Idol became one of the most popular and successful shows in American television history virtually overnight. (The story goes that it never would have been aired in the United States if Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, a huge fan of the show, hadn’t persuaded her father to take a chance on it. She knew what she was doing.)
By now, most of us know how the show works. In its first few weeks, the producers and cast of American Idol city-hop around the United States, auditioning aspiring singers whose talent levels range from expert-but-needs-work, to promising, to at times wincingly bad. Over the course of the season, the show’s three judges eliminate all but twenty-four contestants, until finally the home-viewing audience gets the chance to vote each week, with the contestant with the fewest votes getting kicked off. At the end of the season, the last one standing becomes the next American Idol.
But what do aspiring singers, snarky judges, and dreams of fame, glory, and stardom have to do with the next part of our study? Everything. Until now, I’d only suspected that traditional advertising and marketing strategies like commercials and product placement didn’t work—but now it was time to put them to the ultimate test.
American Idol has three main sponsors, Cingular Wireless (which has since been bought by AT&T, but I’ll refer to it in this chapter as Cingular because that was its name at the time the ads ran), the Ford Motor Company, and Coca-Cola, each of whom fork over an estimated $26 million annually to have their brands featured on one of the highest-rated shows in television history.
And this is only a small part of an enormous and expensive worldwide industry. According to a study conducted by PQ Media, in 2006, companies paid a total of $3.36 billion globally to have their products featured in various TV shows, music videos, and movies. In 2007, this increased to $4.38 billion and is predicted to reach a whopping $7.6 billion by 2010.2 That’s a whole lot of money, given that this would be the first time that the effectiveness of product placement has ever been scientifically tested or validated. As I mentioned, I can’t remember what I ate for dinner the other night, much less the Honda commercial I saw on TV yesterday. So who’s to say I’ll remember what soft drink Simon Cowell was sipping as he leaned forward, eyes gleaming, to lambaste yet another poor soul’s rendition of Alicia Keys’s “Fallin’”?
As viewers, we used to be able to tell the difference between products that somehow play a role or part in a TV show or movie (known in advertising circles as Product Integration) and the standard thirty-second advertising spots that run during the commercial breaks (known as, well, commercials). But increasingly, these two kinds of ads are becoming harder and harder to separate.
On American Idol, Coke and Cingular Wireless not only run thirty-second ads during commercial breaks, they also feature their products prominently during the show itself. (When asked by a fellow judge if he liked a contestant’s song during the February 21, 2008, broadcast, Simon commented, “How much I love Coca-Cola!”—and then took a sip.) The three judges all keep cups of America’s most iconic soft drink in front of them, and both the judges and the contestants sit on chairs or couches with rounded contours specifically designed