US High School students send 34,000 votes to get Diddy to visit

Link: Text messaging catches on in music business – Yahoo! News

The student body won the visit by sending the most text messages to the radio station as part of a campaign to promote his new album, “Press Play.” The station opened the contest to all high schools in the area, asking students to send a text message with the word “Diddy” during a four-day period.

Chula Vista won the contest, logging 34,000 messages. Some students reported sending in hundreds of messages each. In all, the station received more than 170,000 text messages. The Diddy campaign is just one implementation of many that show how record companies and radio stations use text messaging as a promotional tool.

I thought this was both cool and rather inane. The article is about how the music industry is apparently adopting mobile. It’s a bit…….well……. limited, I think, do to something like this. At 10 cents a go, that equates to $3,400 cost to the High School students.

On the basis that there’s, say, 1,000 students at the High School, that’s a cost of $3.40 each.

Not good. I don’t really see the value in that promotion. 170,000 messages in all — that means the station’s listeners spent $17,000 on the competition. The arse being that the other 136,000 votes or $13,600 was a total waste for those sending in their votes. Sure, it’s the same if you’re voting in American Idol or the like, but this is a much more ‘real’ issue and much closer to home for those taking part.

I wonder if they couldn’t have done something a bit more exciting and perhaps less costly. Next time, everyone will know that all they have to do is blow tons and tons of money sending in ‘diddy’ repeatedly to the station.

It’s not like it requires a bit of skill. I dunno. I’ll think on it.