AT&T and American Idol Set SMS Voting Record

Julie Ask | May 23, 2008, 12:52 PM

The season is over, and this is my first blog on Wireless and American Idol. It shouldn't be though as there was a lot of good stuff in this season's show.

Here's the press release.

Highlight: 78 million text votes compared with 64.5 million last year

An excerpt from a survey they did:

This season, AT&T conducted an informal poll on its Web site to get a sense from customers about the role text messaging has played. Poll results are based on the 416 responses submitted March 7 to May 5, 2008.

Fifty-one percent said they tend to text more frequently during the "American Idol" season than other times of the year.
Forty-three percent said they discuss "American Idol" with others via text messaging while watching the show.
Twenty-two percent said they first learned to text message by voting for their favorite Idol contestant.
By texting their votes this season, AT&T's wireless customers helped crown a new "American Idol" champion, David Cook, and made it possible for AT&T to capture a new text messaging milestone for television's No. 1 show.

A new element for this year's show (and, yes, I do watch it) was AT&T relationship with Apple and the iPhone. iTunes has been in place before - promoted on the iTunes site, limited time offers on American Idol recordings, etc. The contestants all seemed to have iPhones this year - lots of screen shots of the contestants listening to music on their phones. Really well done.

Finale was filmed at the Nokia theater. As I watched the finale, I was being to think that the judges and Ryan Seacrest were getting paid for each mention of Nokia ... or they had some quota to fill.

In any case, there are few examples out there of three screen marketing - TV, cellphones and the PC - this one was well done in that it drove consumers to all three medium with purpose.