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ture ourselves differently, Milia needs to be part of MIP, interac- tive departments must report to programming and independent production companies must embrace interactive producers as an essential part of the devel- opment process.
Viewers simply don’t care about the medium. They might participate through a text, the red button or the Internet and in some cases will happily use all three at different moments in a programme. They do think about sport, games, ghostly sightings and contestant evictions to name a few emotional buttons. We need to know them better.
We have a huge responsibility to make interactive services clear and credible. Viewers are already nervous about spending money or even just navigating out of a show at a key moment.
For me, the red button is about event television, it’s about the programme you are watch- ing. It is not about enhanced text services.
Of course these have a role just as text services have played a
role in the last 20 years but let viewers access these through the text button as they always have. If we abuse the event status of the red button, enhanced TV will lose its immediacy & we will be fighting even harder to persuade viewers to leap into our new digital world.
So who forgot to invite advertisers to the party?
If you live in a personal – video- recorder home (PVR) you will already know that you fast forward through the ad breaks. I am not making apoc- alyptic statements about the end of spot advertising. But PVRs will begin to effect behaviour and we need to get creative about weaving adver- tising messages into our pro- gramme narrative.
Interactivity is one way of offering this while respecting the integrity of editorial content
and enabling the viewers to exercise choice.
So here is my wishlist...
Let’s start by asking ourselves why we are doing this in the first
place. Is it about new revenues or better ratings and more engaged viewers for advertisers. Each one will produce very differ- ent results.
Let’s find a way of measuring participation in more useful ways so we understand what our viewers truly value. Lets restruc- ture the business from top to bottom to create seamless pro- gramme teams.
Let’s create an advertising showcase that will inspire the agency world to think differently about the role of interactivity in advertising and above all, let’s put creativity and content back in the driving seat.
Jonathan Webb, who made the keynote speech at a Creative Alchemy event at BAFTA in July,
is Director of Interactive Programming & Controller of Challenge and Trouble at Flextech.
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