Interactive TV Businesses Finally Developing, Executives Say
SAN FRANCISCO - The long-promised advent of an interactive TV businesses may finally be upon the industry, executives said during a panel discussion. Advertisers are demanding more accountability and analysis of how their televised ad campaigns perform, and interactive TV executives at multichannel video programming distributors have finally proved the technology to offer that works, said Larry Samuels, general manager of advanced TV for Dish Network. “It’s no longer ‘wouldn’t it be cool if’ or ‘I wonder if this would work,'” he said at the TV of Tomorrow Conference. “We have stories to tell now with credibility."
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Cable operators’ joint venture Canoe has put advanced ads and interactive TV on the radar of more marketers, Samuels said. “Canoe has been phenomenal about creating buzz and noise,” he said. “Everyone is hearing it now, and everyone is talking about it.” Interactive TV has been around for more than two decades, but now “the dollars are starting to show up,” said Roland Noll, executive director of Integrated Advertising and Commerce at AT&T. “There’s actually the ability to transact business, using the remote control,” he said.
MVPDs that have deployed advanced and interactive ad technology are learning valuable lessons to help shape future marketing campaigns, said Chris Faw, senior vice president of operators for Time Warner Cable. The company has learned that viewers are more engaged with programming on certain networks such as the Food Channel, and less likely to click away on an on-screen prompt during a commercial than on others such as Headline News, he said. Advertisers “can go on Adsense right now and get this level of reporting and now they expect the same thing from TV,” he said.
Enhanced binary interchange format is an interactive TV technology capable of providing the largest scale of addressable devices, but it’s not for everyone, some executives said. “EBIF is not exciting for us on the national marketplace, where we also have more exciting technology available,” said Jason Malamud, general manager of Verizon FiOS advertising. “On the other hand, to be relevant to local and regional advertisers, it was clear to us that the best way to monetize our inventory” was to work with EBIF and with cable operators, he said.
Interactive TV applications developed for new TV sets require a big change in consumer behavior to succeed, David Preisman, vice president of interactive TV for Showtime Networks said on a later panel. “First you have to get over the hurdle that the consumer has to connect the TV set to the Internet.” Then the consumer has to think about what user-interface it wants to access content, and it could be the MVPD’s or the TV manufacturer’s, he said. “It could be that the remote for the TV is in the drawer somewhere,” he said. “There is a big change in behavior to say ‘I have all these choices in cable, but instead I'm going to use my TV remote and go to their app gallery.'"