Coming up with a $76-million idea

You know who is really smart? You know who deserves a big old fat-daddy raise? The person who came up with "Idol Gives Back."

Do you remember this from last year's American Idol? Ryan & the judges went to visit Africa? And Carrie Underwood remade that Pretenders song? And Kevin Bacon and Dr. House and that guy who's married to J.Lo and Hugh Grant and all those other people lip-synced to "Stayin Alive." Yeah, remember that show?

Fucking brilliant, I tell you.




OK, well the video maybe wasn't brilliant. The video may have been a spectacular waste of television minutes which, let's face it, AI does a lot. Nevertheless, the whole Idol Gives Back concept was just fucking brilliant.

Becauase look what you've got to start with: a TV phenomenon. For the most part, celebrities have been pretty willing to appear on the show simply because there's a good chance at least fifty percent of the free world will be tuning in. So we've got ourselves a little hit here; we don't really need celebrities. We're making outrageous ratings without celebrities. If we wanted to get really greedy with viewers, what could we do to make every single A-list celebrity on the scene simply bang down our door to get on the show? Hmmm...oh! What about a CHARITY?

Because it doesn't get any more WIN-WIN than that: AI and A-list. Now that you've got celebs attached to the program, the sponsors are gonna come out of the woodwork to get their name attached to this. Cool, now all the expenses are covered - AI can fly a plane full of singers to a whole other continent AND IT DOESN'T COST THEM A THING.

Ryan doesn't even have to ask all those AI callers to pledge any money. All they have to do is make their usual calls for their contestents - hell, we'll even leave the phone lines open TWICE AS LONG as usual - and our generous sponsors will donate the money! Next thing you know, $76 million is going to Second Harvest and Save the Children and UNICEF. Woot!

The thing is, they didn't have to do it. They still would've gotten top ratings. And I don't believe they did it because they had a responsibility to give back wah wah wah. Oh no, they did it for one reason only: Because HOLY SHIT IT COULD BE HUGE!

This is PR at its finest, people. All the media has bought into the hype. I mean, who's going to say anything negative about a multi-million-dollar effort to single-handedly wipe out world hunger? Even Bono bestowed his holy sanctification. And this year? Brad Pitt. There's no stopping this PR machine, baby.

It is so fucking brilliant, they should have fired every person who didn't think of it.