The Role of Toll Free Numbers in Reality Programs

There are many different kinds of programs in television that we see everyday. They are usually shown once or twice a week. The famous ones that we see are the soap operas like Brothers and Sisters or Grey's Anatomy, situational comedies like How I Met Your Mother or Two and a Half Men, talk shows like The Tyra Banks Show or The Ellen Degeneres Show and the many quiz shows like Jeopardy or The Wheel of Fortune.

Introducing a new type of television program is very risky since audience familiarity plays a very important part. The advent of reality television shows during the 80's is an exception. Today, reality television shows are one of the most, or maybe the most famous among the television program types. Examples of reality television include America's Best Dance Crew, Dancing with the Stars and American Idol which have grown immensely since it started 8 years ago.

These reality shows make use of their own toll free numbers for audiences to vote for contestants. Whoever gets the most number of votes from the audience is in and whoever has the lowest number of votes is kicked out from the competition.

Let's focus on American Idol. They usually have 12 contestants for the past 7 season but for season 8, they made it 13 which is really surprising to audiences and makes it even more controversial. Now, how do toll free numbers work in these kinds of programs? Let's take for example the 13 contestants of American Idol. What happens is, these contestants get their own set of unique toll free numbers so audiences can vote for them by calling their respective toll free numbers. For American Idol, they are considering their viewers not only because they make use of toll free number service but they also made it into a vanity number by including the word IDOL in the whole set of toll free numbers so that audiences will easily remember them. So if I'm one of the avid viewers of the show and I want to vote for contestant number one, all I have to do is call the toll free number 1-866-Idol-01 or 1-866-4365-01, but as you can see, it's easier to remember if we make use of the vanity number rather than a plain number, right?

It only shows that the popularity of toll free numbers have increased massively because television programs, specifically reality television shows, are now making use of them to involve their audiences - and it has proven that, indeed, it's working.