I’m not sure how many of you watch American Idol, but an Indian kid named Sanjaya got very far. With only a handful of contestants left, no one thought such a bad singer would get this far. There are many factors that caused him to get this far, but here is how offline and online media
played a role.

Indians

Before I go into offline and online media affecting the voting, let me dispel any rumors of him getting far just because of other Indians. I personally do not watch American Idol, but even I myself thought one of the main reasons he got so far was because he had a large following of Indians and as many of you already know there are tons of Indians in this world. Based on a survey I did of 50 random Indians, I concluded that isn’t the main reason why he got so far. The 50 Indians I surveyed watched American Idol, but only 1 voted for him because the rest did not either know how to text message or were afraid that American Idol would charge them for voting.

From my understanding (I could be wrong) you can also call by phone and vote without paying a dime… but either way many Indians were afraid of getting charged. Because of this the main two other factors that I can tell caused him to do so well were related to both offline and online
media.

Offline and Online Media

As we all know the combination of offline and online media can be very powerful. With social media sites like MySpace, YouTube, Vote for the Worst, and Netscape covering Sanjaya it’s no wonder he racked in all those votes. People who use these sites as well as read blogs are very tech savvy and probably text
message (vote for Sanjaya) quite a bit. Then if you combine this people like Howard Stern telling America to vote for Sanjaya because he was the worst singer out of the group and his support from stars like Jennifer Lopez, no wonder he got so far. Here is the buzz he created through this last season of American Idol:

• Over 1.4 million web pages have talked about Sanjaya Malakar, not counting those that misspelled his name.
• There is a Wikipedia page (with over 581 incoming links) on Sanjaya Malakar.
• Over 3000 blogs have talked about him.
• He become so well known online that people started talking about his sister.
• There are thousands of videos about him on the web.

If Sanjaya would have actually won American Idol it probably would have been humorous as well as ironic. I don’t think too many people would have bought his CD if he won, but we had a great laugh getting him this far or at least watching him get this far. Either way this just shows how powerful
offline media and online media are when they are combined, so the next time you do a marketing campaign try to combine both offline and online media.