Tuesday, February 5, 2013

AMERICAN IDOL: DANGER AHEAD

The Times called him “heartless, thoughtless and superficial,” yet Simon Cowell’s angry villainous chair was the glue that kept American Idol alive for many years. With Simon making clear his plans to leave, is Fox tactically forcing him to return back? by Pallavi Srivastava

Cowell’s sweeping conquest of the American teletube is surely surprising, keeping in mind the show’s low profile debut way back in 2002. In fact, the first season of this singing reality show failed to make a place for itself even in the list of the decade’s top 125 shows. While American Idol Season 1 cornered an average of 13.5 million viewers for the ‘results’ episodes, the figure stood at 12.5 million for the ‘performance’ shows. But that’s history now. Here is a glimpse of the present: The opening night (Tuesday episode) of American Idol Season 9, a few weeks back, cornered 29.9 million viewers. However, the Wednesday episode registered a fall in viewership with 26.4 million viewers. This is said to be the lowest-rated opening Wednesday of the season for Idol since its second season in 2003! Worse, the viewership average of the first two opening nights of American Idol Season 9 fell short of the figures for Season 8 (aired in 2009) by a noteworthy 5%!

Despite the recent fall in ratings, American Idol has been able to thwart-off competition from the combined ABC-CBS-NBC-CW by about 50% in the adult segment (for ages 18-49; Nielsen Ratings). This was clearly reflected in the overall network viewership too, which stood as follows for the week January 18-24, 2010: Fox – 21.8 million, CBS – 11.4 million, NBC – 6.3 million, ABC – 5.9 million, Univision – 3.8 million, and CW – 0.7 million. Undoubtedly, Fox remains the undisputed ruler for now, with distant followers! Automatically, as mentioned, the high rating churner for Fox is also their biggest cash earner! As per data provided by TNS Media Intelligence, American Idol Season 8 generated $843 million in advertising revenues for Fox. It even became the most expensive regular series in the prime-time slot on TV, with a 30-sec spot costing an average of $707,000! And if that wasn’t enough, American Idol has played the launch pad for Fox’s other popular series like Fringe, House, Lie to Me and Glee.

Evidently, Simon’s trumpet exit call has done a great wake-up job with the top management brass at Fox, who have tactically bought the exclusive American telecast rights to Cowell’s X Factor.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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