• by Shankar Gupta , March 15, 2005

"American Idol" fanatics today can find yet another way to incorporate the hit show into their lives, with the "American Idol Experience Messenger," created by a partnership of MECA Communications and FremantleMedia, the show's co-producer and licensor.

MECA's messenger program works across a range of different instant messenger services--including AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, and MSN Messenger--and will be branded and released as the American Idol Experience Messenger, which can be downloaded for free by fans of the show to access exclusive content and get special Idol-branded "skins" for their messenger windows.

"Relatively young people that live on [instant messenger] are very receptive to a broader and deeper experience rather than just going to a branded portal site and using instant messenger as a utility," said MECA CEO Bob Kimball. "We're just trying to strike a little bit of a distinction here. This is more than just an instant messenger; this is a way to tie the instant messenger user to a brand they care about."

MECA's vice president of business development, Sam Wick, said the messenger program offers the chance to get brands deeper into customers' computer routines. "We're offering an opportunity to extend to the desktop, where the consumers are day in and day out," Wick said. Using the messenger, MECA can also send messages to everyone who has downloaded the program, unless they have chosen to opt-out of receiving them.

In addition to the "skins" that users can download--which will change the look of the windows that their chats and contact lists appear in--users of the messenger will be able to download extra content from the shows, participate in chats with the contestants, and enter in contests to win iPods, downloads from iTunes, and Idol merchandise, including tickets to see the show's finale. The branded messenger program has been available for download on the AmericanIdolMessenger.com site since March 2, but was in what Kimball described as a "soft launch," and was only officially announced today. "We wanted to make sure that the dogs like the dog food before we're saying that the dog food is served," Kimball said. He declined to release the number of times the messenger had been downloaded during the soft launch.