Last night's return of American Idol wasn't as triumphant as one might expect. The seventh season scored ratings which were the lowest in 4 years.
This, in the wake of the news that sponsors like Ford, Coca-Cola and AT&T will pay a record $35 million, up from the $30 million from season 6.
Now here comes the interesting part, articulated logically in the Adweek article (which obviously came out before AI7 did:
...but the advertisers are likely to get an even better return on their costly investment than they had hoped for. With the writers strike having shut down production on most original scripted programming, Idol, which premieres Tuesday night, is expected to be an even bigger ratings juggernaut than ever.
Nope.
Which begs the questions to be asked:
- Is the damage from the writers strike causing somewhat of an umbrella effect on all TV watching?
- Could this be the catalyst that delivers the final straw that broke the 30-second camel's back?
- Are people continuing to wean themselves off television in favor of a variety of entertainment alternatives - from gaming to DVD's to online video to fragmenting cable to books?
- Has the bubble of contrived control and artificially inseminated celebrity finally burst (in favor of the rise of citizen journalism/consumer generated content etc)?
Personally, I'm not so sure I'd be engraving tombstones just yet, but I do think that when pretty much TV's number 1 program has a 4-year fall-off in light of literally being the only game in town, there's an irreparable crack in the dam wall, which no finger is going to plug anytime soon.
Or it could just be this dude that's doing the damage.
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