What Eurovision Can Teach Us About New Ideas
Insight from 64 Years of Over-the-Top European Entertainment
With the release of Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga on Netflix, the world may finally learn about the grandeur and camp of the longest-running international music contest. Will Ferrell’s love letter to intern may have mixed reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but the story of plucky dreamers from a small town reaching a global stage struck a chord with me. I wasn’t the only: avid watchers catapulted Fire Saga to the #2 slot on the service.
More than just over-the-top costumes and production, I truly believe Eurovision is a perennially entertaining spectacle about how to find adoration — not just for a song, but for an idea. Teams in marketing and startups would do well to consider the long history of how trends and tastes converge every year at Eurovision. My favorite story, by far, is the only year Finland has won the Eurovision, harnessing unforgettable presentation and the psychographics of nations concerning an emerging genre of music.
Geography & Psychology
How does Eurovision work? It would be kind of like The Voice if each contestant were representing a country. They perform and get ranked, starting with competitions within each country, then ultimately performers reach the international competition where they are ranked by each other nation to determine a winner. This format means participants must make a song that appeals to as many countries as possible. This usually means the songs become saccharine pop and bland ballads, leading to the constant criticism of the contest as lacking creativity.
However, there is one more component to the scoring: The Popular Vote.
Half the score every year is based on popular call-in/text-in voting from the audience. This outsized influence the audience means the tastes of the populous countries — Russia, Turkey, Germany, France, the United Kingdom — have an outsized effect on the outcome of the Eurovision (adjusted by the relative popularity of the contest in each country).
This speaks to the adoption of new ideas: rather than trying to sell to the whole world, realize that there is a real landscape beyond geography that reflects your most likely early-adopter. Most importantly, it means that if you’re a small place due to the number of people — like Finland representing only 0.6% of the European population — you can still find a market for ideas if you understand what you’re good at and how to share it with people like you.
Give The People What They Want
In most years of Eurovision, the winning entry has is a pop song (in English) with an earworm hook and catchy chorus — or a dramatic ballad (in English) about love. This is despite many of the entries being in the native language of their contributing country and the popular cries for originality across the audience of the contest. It’s the same kind of creative monotony around big-budget movies.
So, how (and when) can you find a market for a new idea?
The key is to take a look at the landscape around you and consider where you excel versus what is accelerating in popularity. For Finland in the year 2006, this was — surprisingly enough — Heavy Metal.
At the time everyone in America was learning about Shakira’s hips, the heavy metal scene in Europe was snowballing. Though none had cracked into the top billboard charts, they were getting real play on the radio with more and more bands touring successfully across the continent. It wasn’t clear at the time that this would be what people want, but there was clearly a wave. If you’re lucky enough even to see one, then you should commit to it.
Through the organic voting process in the Eurovision, Finland ended up selecting one of these heavy metal bands to represent them in the contest.
Finland had never won. Heavy metal had never won.
What chance did they have?
How New Ideas Win
The thing about never having won is the liberation of having nothing to lose.
When Lordi took the stage in Greece for their first performance in the semi-final, they didn’t draw the biggest cheer from the crowd. However, after the points were calculated, they smashed the previous record — for the last 51 years — and went on to win the final contest two days later with the same final record-setting score.
How did Doom Metal with a Doomed Chance win? How can you?
Be Yourself. Lordi was the pure distillation of their craft and focused on their strengths. They didn’t have to make everyone happy, because they were happy being themselves.
Ride a wave. If you refer back to the Map of countries by Heavy Metal band, you will notice that populous and influential countries — like Germany — also have a lot of Heavy Metal appreciation. The wave doesn’t have to be a tsunami, but you need to be at the top when it crests.
Differentiate. They were unforgettable in their presentation. Their one-of-a-kind approach made for one-of-a-kind results. And they were finally able to seize upon the desire for originality, giving the audience something fresh.
Erik Ralston is an innovator with 17 years of education and experience, having spent the last 5 years in leadership at the fastest growing tech company in Australia. Erik is also co-founder of Fuse Accelerator in the emerging community of Tri-Cities, WA, where he works on connecting people and sharing knowledge to turn new ideas into growing startups. You can find him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or the next Fuse event — once Benton county hits its milestones for Phase 2
