The Ticking Time Bomb of Technological Novelty

New TV Strategies Sept 1998

Mark Brown Planning Director @LeoBurnett

Interactive television provides us with a new and exciting medium. However there will come a point in the future when it will be difficult to remember when interactivity didn’t exist. All our TV programming will be interactive, our radio will be interactive, we have already seen interactive posters and our daily newspapers delivered electronically will be tailored and responsive. In short, we will scoff at the days before we had a two-way relationship with our media.It is not possible to say with any certainty how long it will be before this smiling happy world of interactivity comes along, but come along it will. How different will we feel as marketing professionals when this happens? Interactive TV will no longer be a new and exciting fringe specialism; it will be the norm. Every single strategy, every single piece of communication will be developed around interactive technology. It will have lost some of its excitement.If this is true for us, then the same pattern will inevitably exist for consumers. Our current ‘guinea pig’ interactive TV viewers are feeling different now to how they will in the future.

“This interactive TV thing is great fun. It’s so clever how you can do the things you can do. Friends come round and I show them. They think it’s great. When there is nothing on TV I switch to an interactive channel so I can play with the interactive ads.”

But familiarity breeds contempt.

“What is interactive? Oh, you mean when you can change what you are seeing on the screen yourself. Well yeah it’s useful sometimes, but it’s nothing special. I only really bother with it if it’s something I’m really interested in. I mean if you messed about with all this stuff it would take forever.”

Do you remember the time before cash machines, mobile phones, PC’s? For the child of today, online encyclopaedia are common place, the internet is just a part of their normal world, they were born to it, it holds no mystique. As interactivity becomes common place the novelty will wear off. This does not mean that it will not continue to be as useful to us as communicators, it means that we will have to work harder to engage people. We will no longer be able to rely on the novelty of the technology to do part of the job for us.This additional consumer response generated while the technology is innovative to viewers, I have called the ‘Technology Novelty Factor’.

This means that, like all media, as time goes on we will have to make our creative work harder and harder to generate interest. However, whilst this will create challenges for us in the future, it actually gives us a problem NOW.

We are currently experimenting with interactive TV. We are exploring different approaches, trying new techniques, finding out what works best for our individual

Consumer InterestTime

Consumer Response to an Interactive TVad when the technology is still new

Normal response to creative idea

Technology Novelty Factor

brands and clients. Our clients are funding this and I am sure that if you looked at the types of clients who are investing in this experimentation, they will tend to be the large successful multinationals. These companies are good at marketing. They know how to spend their budgets to best effect, to beat the competition. The very reason they are experimenting with Interactive TV is because they want to find out if there is a greater benefit to spending their money in an interactive medium than a traditional one. Interactive TV is more expensive than traditional TV. It is more expensive to produce. It is more expensive to manage the development because it takes more expensive people more time to get things on air. It is more expensive to support the back end. That is not to say it is too expensive. Quite the opposite. Interactive TV may be excellent value for money IF the return on the investment is greater than from traditional TV. Our clients will not support interactivity for the sake of it, only if there is profit in it. Now, I have no doubt that an interactive ad when designed properly can be more effective than a non-interactive ad. However it is not enough to merely believe, it has to be proven.Here is where we have the problem.In this experimentation phase, we will have to demonstrate the effectiveness of interactive TV. We will have to somehow measure consumer response to demonstrate that we are getting a greater return on our investment. (At least we will have to demonstrate that we WILL get a better return when interactivity is scaled up.) If we can’t do that, we can’t justify the additional investment in an interactive ad.Measuring effectiveness is difficult at the best of times. However, it is even more difficult in this case because of the of the ‘Technology Novelty Factor’. Whatever measurements we put in place now will be measuring in part consumer reaction to the ‘clever’ technology. As we have already established, this novelty factor will wear off at some point in the future. This will mean a diminished consumer response that will in turn mean a lower return on investment. So, at some point in the future when Interactive technology is available to all TV viewers, we will find clients holding multi-million pound budgets who can choose to make Interactive TV ads or to make traditional TV ads. A more expensive Interactive ad will mean fewer ratings but greater consumer involvement. This greater consumer involvement will have been proven in the past. We will have set the standards, set the expectation, and if we are not careful we will be setting them too high. There is nothing more certain than the behaviour of a large budget holder in these circumstances. Given a choice of the safe, traditional option that won’t get them fired, versus the new option that is not performing as expected, the budget holder will take the safe option everyday. And who can blame them. A deviation of only 10% versus expectation when dealing with these multi million pound budgets is enough to draw the attention of even the most forgiving Finance Director. Forgiveness is not an often seen quality of FD’s especially when they return from a particularly heated grilling from their shareholders. So, back to our problem. We must ensure that we recognise the ‘Technology Novelty Factor’ during the early stages of interactive development. If we can’t estimate its effect, we must at least register it in all performance measurements. This might feel like we are selling interactivity short in the present but it will prevent many problems in the future. Ideally we should work towards an industry standard which could be used to discount the response of a new adopter of iTV. Realistically we will not be able to identify how big this factor is or how long it lasts but merely recognise that it exists.At best it is irresponsible to ignore this factor. At worst we could be priming a time bomb which if it were to blow up at a critical time in the development of interactive TV could set us back years.