Dear Readers:
Well, your friendly neighborhood doctor may have stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest with the column, "Let's Pause for a Word from our Sponsors" (The iTV Doctor, April 23, 2010). On the week of the Cable Show, I thought I'd share a letter received from a contributor who prefers to remain anonymous. But I can tell you the writer has a wealth of experience in television and interactive television advertising.
And another reader has unearthed an October, 2008 Motorola Solutions Paper, "Advertising Opportunities for Network Operators," that provides not only reference language, but also a graphic that does a terrific job of illustrating a definition of telescoping: http://www.motorola.com/staticfiles/Business/Products/_Documents/_Static...
Here's the letter:
"Dear iTV Doctor:
I enjoyed your latest post on [itvt]. If I was not under a rock (actually I have moved to under the porch), that piece would have generated the following response:
Don't try and solve everyone's problem.
The early days of telescoping interactivity do not assume PAUSE. GET OVER IT. Don't apologize for it. Do folks who put an 800 number in their advertising and say 'Call within the next 10 minutes' apologize for interrupting a program. We in the interactive TV business have turned into the apologizers for all that is wrong with TV. That is a lot of pressure for anyone to be under.
The key mistake that all of the really smart people in our business make is that we are looking for the PERFECT execution in an imperfect environment, and we talk ourselves out of really good ideas because we can't solve all the edge cases. Leave the edge cases alone, shoot for the middle.
What I believe the iTV folks should do is get interactivity up and working, make it a good user experience and then put it into the marketplace. The viewer will quickly understand that the show is not paused and will only click on the interactivity when the interactivity has a chance to be more entertaining and informative than the underlying program (good bet on a lot of TV programming today). Serious viewers of ABC's 'Lost' won't click on an interactive ad if they are really following the show. But casual viewers, TV grazers, will follow the interactivity to its natural conclusion.
Do you think early 800 number advertisers and sellers were stopped by the notion that viewers would become distracted from the TV show if they called the 800 number right away. They made the experience compelling and didn't give a damn if it was disruptive. There are plenty of examples of disruptive advertising using various calls to action. Try and find an ad today that does not contain a URL, directing people to seek out more information.
Telescoping is just a new call to action, don't make it more than it is."
And here is the language and graphic from the Motorola Solutions Paper:
"Telescoping technology can be implemented as a VOD-type session initiated from an onscreen graphic, or it could allow a subscriber to pull a pre-positioned video clip from the local drive of a DVR. The effect to the user would be similar, but this type of flexibility allows the operator to balance network and local resources. Regardless of how the ad is inserted, the experience for the user involves automatically pausing the currently viewing video and moving to an individually controllable long-form advertisement."
As promised, the good doctor will do a comprehensive follow-up column shortly after the Cable Show, complete with on-the-record comments from some of the key players involved in the process of "Pausing for a Word from our Sponsors," including hardware manufacturers, software developers and even patent holders.
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The iTV Doctor is *Rick Howe*, who provides interactive television consulting services to programmers and advertisers. He is the recipient of a CTAM Tami Award for retention marketing and this year was nominated to Cable Pioneers. He is also the co-author of a patent for the use of multiscreen mosaics in EPG's. Endorsed by top cable and satellite distributors, "Dr" Howe still makes house calls, and the first visit is always free. His services include product development, distribution strategy and the development of low-cost interactive applications for rapid deployment across all platforms. Have a question for the iTV Doctor? Email him at itvdoctor@itvt.com
