Overzealous Marketing Ploys Edit
Did AT&T Taint “American Idol” Voting for Kris Allen?

American Idol’s biggest sponsor, AT&T, and their marketing department may have gone a little overboard in promoting votes for Kris Allen on American Idol.

AT&T distributed phones in Arkansas, Kris Allen’s home state, and even taught people how to text in their votes for American Idol. Adam Lambert didn’t get the same treatment in San Diego. Perhaps AT&T figured people in Arkansas just couldn’t figure out this new contraption called the cellular phone and all of that texting stuff.

Here’s what Rolling Stone had to say about the fracas:

AT&T reps helped partygoers at a pair of Arkansas events cast “power texts,” a function that permits the sending of 10 or more texts at a single time; the NYT notes such messages obviously “have an exponentially greater effect on voting than do single text messages or calls to the show’s toll-free phone lines.”