Keith Hindle

TV Real Weekly, July, 16, 2008

Executive VP, Licensing, Americas

FremantleMedia Enterprises

Beginning early next year, visitors to the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida will get a small taste of what it’s like to be a part of American Idol. The hit talent show from FremantleMedia and 19 Entertainment, which recently wrapped its seventh season, continues to be a ratings juggernaut for FOX. Beyond becoming a pop-culture institution, the series has spawned a significant licensing and merchandising campaign, and the theme-park attraction, announced in February, is just one among a string of off-screen initiatives for the popular global brand.

The destination will be located at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, allowing guests to “audition” in video kiosks. Those who pass this stage will be able to perform in front of a live audience and a panel of judges. A new winner will be picked every day, securing them a guaranteed reservation for a future regional stadium audition to potentially be on the show itself.

Keith Hindle, who leads sponsorship and licensing efforts on FremantleMedia’s brands in the Americas, explains that the deal with Disney World is part of a broader strategy to make American Idol “a year-round property. It gives us a chance to engage fans throughout the year, not just while the show is on air.”

Hindle continues: “The diary of Idol is, the show is on air January through May, and then the Idols will go on tour. During July and August the actual auditions take place for the following season with people going to the massive stadiums and queuing up to try to become the next American Idol. And then we have a bit of a hiatus toward the end of the year. Now, with Disney, we’ll have something all-year round.”

There are also numerous product categories available at retail, from T-shirts to console games. An area that Hindle has been particularly keen to pursue is off-air sponsorships, so as to not saturate the TV show itself with brand appearances. “We spend more time saying no to deals than we spend saying yes, particularly for in-show sponsorships,” Hindle explains. “We have a range now of eight purely off-air partners, so no exposure within the TV show at all, but national exclusive sponsors within their category. For example, Nestl�, the official confectionery partner, created 90 million candy bars with American Idol promotions on-pack,” offering up prizes like a seat at the finale. Dreyer’s ice cream is also on board as an off-air sponsor. Hindle notes: “We found that Idol had a similar phenomenon that existed with Friends, when pizza sales spiked enormously—girls in particular would order pizza and watch it with their friends. Idol is a much more family-oriented show, so people tend to buy ice cream and watch it together. So Dreyer’s has become the national official ice cream of American Idol. It’s both a sponsorship and a consumer-products deal. We try and find things like this, where they kind of mimic the TV show. They issued a range of new flavors, all tied to Idol in some way—Hollywood Cheesecake, Choc and Roll—and the buyers would try them, pick their favorite and vote on the website and the winner becomes the permanent flavor.”

Another off-screen initiative for Idol this year was its collaboration with iTunes, which allowed users to purchase and download performances from the show the morning after the episode aired. “We’d been talking to iTunes for about four years,” says Hindle. “It got to a place where we and iTunes felt that the brands were connected. iTunes has become so iconic in what it does, and so has Idol. The results were absolutely fantastic. We were blown away by the extent of it. The week after the show ended, our winner, David Cook, had 16 songs in the Billboard 100, it was absolutely extraordinary.”

The in-show sponsors—Coke, AT&T and Ford—have also been strengthening their associations with Idol outside of the TV screen. “Those three big sponsorship deals, which are among the biggest in the world—only outside the Olympics, I believe—are very extensive. Each of those partners have started to do lots of activity outside the show—so on-pack, in-store, promotional events, in malls, those kinds of things. We started developing with AT&T more and more content specifically delivered to mobile-phone users.”

Hindle says that the “most fascinating” part of his job has been working with AT&T and Telescope, which handle the huge volume of calls received for the series. This May, Idol surpassed records, scoring 97.5 million phone votes and 31.7 million viewers for the finale. “Over the season we did over a half a million votes,” Hindle says.

When Idol was first being pitched to the broadcast networks, Hindle explains that the entire concept of phone voting, for free, posed “one of the biggest difficulties we had in selling the show. That’s a rather large price tag that has to be picked up. It’s the absolute essence of the show. FOX fortunately went for it and had the courage to do it. But there were extraordinary leaps in the telephony network that had to be put in place to be able to have the infrastructure actually sustain the amount of votes we receive. We had to work with AT&T engineers over the years to build that capacity and ensure the systems could cope.”

While Idol is certainly FremantleMedia’s biggest brand in the U.S., Hindle is busy working on a host of other properties, including America’s Got Talent, The Price is Right and FOX’s upcoming Hole in the Wall, among others. A Briton who spent several years with FremantleMedia in the U.K. and Germany before relocating to the U.S., Hindle is relishing the variety of opportunities available for brand extensions to the company’s shows. “There’s an enormous number of directions you can go in: sponsorship, digital content, live events, consumer products�The flipside of that is, you’re in a constant sense of guilt—there’s always something you should be doing that you haven’t figured out yet!”

—By Mansha Daswani