And The American Idol Winner Is...The Phone Company!

As most everyone in America seems to know, last night was the final voting session for American Idol, with the winner being announced tonight.

But here's what's really interesting - in the two hours following the airing of the show, SBC, our regional Bell company, reported that 9.6 million calls were placed by Wisconsin residents, 84% more than an average Tuesday evening.

Grabbing my calculator, that means that 7.1 million incremental calls were placed last night (an average of 3.4 incremental calls per Wisconsin household). Since in Wisconsin most of us pay 6 cents per call, SBC pocketed $426,000 more last night than normal. Not bad for 2 hours of sitting around watching the call tracking screens... Multiply that by 50 states, and there's a tidy sum.

And I spent the whole evening at my wife's wonderful recital for all of her violin students - so someone else placed my 3.4 calls too. And without my permission!

More importantly, as one who has never watched American Idol, I'm very interested in understanding this phenomena - as its success could be valuable for all PR people to understand.

What, in your opinion, is driving this, and what lessons can we learn from it?

To weigh in, hit the comments button below and let us know what you think!

I look forward to seeing your thoughts...

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