‘American Idol’
losing steam,
but who will
take its place?
‘IDOL’ from p. 1
longer the highest-priced show on net-
work TV—it now shares that title with
“Sunday Night Football.”
A weakening “Idol” is bad news for
Madison Avenue. There simply is no
alternative with similar reach and rat-
ings. If “Idol” were to go away, advertis-
ers would be forced to spread their dol-
lars around ore. It might also rejigger
the investments they make with each
network, because “Idol” advertisers
often get their ads in the show as part of
a larger Fox package.
“I don’t think it’s as simple as figuring out what other programs are the
alternative,” said Christine Fuller, managing director-media investment at
WPP’s MediaCom.
“Idol” ratings declines this year are
bigger than what Fox executives anticipated, said one executive familiar with
the network. Even Chase Carey, second-in-command of Fox parent News Corp.,
has taken notice, admitting at a recent
investor conference that “the ratings
aren’t where we would have hoped.”
The program is in need of “fresh energy,” the deputy chairman and president
of News Corp. added.
Softer ratings could give buyers a
negotiating tool during the upfronts,
when TV networks hope to sell most of
their ad inventory for the coming fall
season. If the “Idol” ratings situation
becomes more pronounced, advertisers
may push back against the rates Fox
seeks for the show and “look at the over-
all Fox mix,” said Ms. Fuller. “They still
are the No. 1 show in their time period
on Wednesday night, but not by the
margin they have been in the past.”
On the other hand, there are few
MICHAEL BECKER/FOX
other places for “Idol” advertisers to go,
just as there wouldn’t have been much
of an alternative for marketers reliant on
football had there been an NFL strike.
Revitalizing the program is therefore crucial for both Fox and marketers.
Fox runs “Idol” about three hours a
week for half the season; the show
accounts for about 20% of its 15 prime-time hours each week January through
May. While “The X Factor” will return
this fall and is viewed as a sort of heir
apparent to “Idol,” the new show’s ratings are not close to the 20 million
mark.
Advertisers, meanwhile, need “Idol”
because only a handful of traditional
prime-time shows on broadcast TV
command such attention in this age of
splintering audiences and new media-
consumption devices.“Idol” charter
advertiser AT&T declined to comment
while another, Coca-Cola, said in a
statement, “We continue to believe in
the show as a great way to communi-
cate with our core consumers.”
Knives have been out for “Idol” for
years. Last year, CBS tested a dance
competition featuring Paula Abdul on
Wednesdays opposite “Idol” (it failed to
catch on). And NBC’s decision to hold
off on a fall launch for the second sea-
son of “The Voice” and run it with
“Idol” in the second half of the season
speaks to an increasing vulnerability
for the older program.
Fox’s veteran
talent show has
been tops on TV
for the past six
seasons . But
much like “Idol”
judge Steven
Tyler, the show is
starting to show
gray in its 11th
season. As of
Feb. 26, more
viewers in the
18-to-49 demo
tuned into
NBC’s
“The Voice.”
known until the final third of the season, when audiences grow more enthusiastic about particular finalists. And
“Idol,” which on a combined basis
attracts 19. 8 million viewers, isn’t
primed to vanish (The last show to draw
that number of viewers in its 11th season was CBS’s “Murder She Wrote”
nearly 20 years ago.)
There is no lack of ideas for moving
“Idol” forward. Ms. Fuller would like to
see a better rapport among the judges
and suggested the practice of using
“auditions to showcase people with not
as much talent” may have run its course.
And at Fox, the network is not complacent about its flagship show.
Even so, “Idol” once walked alone
among TV shows. Now it has company.
Facebook tells marketers social
at scale will not come for free
FACEBOOK from p. 1
ended with cocktails under the life-size
replica of a blue whale in the Museum
of Natural History and a performance
by Alicia Keys. There, Facebook sug-
gested that marketers reorganize them-
selves around social. It produced a
handy playbook with a proposed orga-
nizational chart for marketers that
advises creating a position to “oversee
social across the organization” (and
report directly to the chief marketing
officer) as well as a “pages team” dedi-
cated to Facebook. It also suggested a
terminology in which Facebook ads will
no longer be “ads” but “stories.”
Audacious, yes, but Facebook, now
on its way to a public offering, has built
incredible scale as well as engagement.
In the U.S., it ranks No. 1 in time spent
and ad impressions and No. 2, to
Google sites, in total internet visits. No
doubt some marketers will restructure
to take advantage of it, just as they
retooled to take advantage of search.
“We’re going to see the emergence
of quite different organizational
designs over the next few years,” said
Nigel Morris, CEO of Aegis Media
Americas, which is a member of
Facebook’s client council of top brand
and agency partners.
For more on the
latest Facebook
changes, go to
AdAge.com/digital
proclamation Facebook has made
about advertising. In 2007, it sum-
moned the ad community to an event
where CEO Mark Zuckerberg, then
24, announced: “The next hundred
years will be different for advertising,
and it starts today.”
But in the nearly five years since, a
persistent undercurrent has been that
Facebook’s attitude toward advertising
verges on intolerance, as the company
has mostly relegated ads to the right
rail and kept them small, innocuous
and, as some researchers assert, inef-
fective—largely because the reach is
limited to fans and their friends.
That appears to be changing with
last week’s news of premium ads, long-awaited mobile ads and ads on the log-off page. (Advertising on Facebook’s
massively trafficked log-on page remain
off-limits to marketers, however.)
“These new ads are the first indication that being publicly traded will
reset the balance between users and
marketers in a marketer’s favor,” said
Chris Wexler, director-strategy at
Campbell Mithun. “Don’t expect
MySpace 2.0 anytime soon. But you
will see marketing messages continue
to invade what has been a largely ad-free place.”
