InteracTiVoty - All Clicks Are Not Created Equal - Mark Risis - MediaBizBlogger

Doesn't it feel like interactive TV is heating up? There is much action on the infrastructure side, on the research side, and certainly on the PR front, with press releases blanketing the news alerts and panels filling over capacity when the topic refers to a dynamic, intelligent TV universe of the future. Networks, service providers, agencies, technology companies, and research houses all are jumping into the fray and trying to get the industry excited about the possibilities. Addressability, a stalwart of the advanced TV vision, is finally making an appearance on a national scale, and interactive applications (the type that we at TiVo had in market, successfully, for the last five years) are finally starting to make their phoenix-like re-emergence from the rubble of Telescoping's spectacular collapse over half a decade ago.

Macro-forces and uber-promises occupy the vast share of attention in these discussions, but little or no attention is paid to the tangible impact that all this will have on the viewer. The question of what the impact will be on the viewer's behavior with TV-based content and associated applications remains unanswered. Ultimately, I believe it is the viewer's willingness to engage with these new forms of advertising that will shape the way the industry evolves, since that's where the tangible value to advertisers - the ones spending all the money - resides.

To help define this viewer behavior value, it is imperative that we start to complement the 10,000 feet in the air discussions - exciting and PR-worthy though they may be - with some down and dirty, in the thick of it, what-does-it-all-really-come-down-to dialogue. It is by getting into the executional thicket with our analytical machetes that we may finally start to see where the rubber meets the road, and begin to craft an argument that MBA-trained brand managers will actively embrace as part of their standard scorecard-centric toolkit.

A perfect place to start this discussion is with the thing that makes all future TV viewer experiences fundamentally different than all those that preceded it - namely, the Click.

When a consumer sees an ad message she likes, and chooses to Click on it, she is implicitly saying that she is interested, probably trusts that brand, and is willing to take time away from watching TV to hear what the brand has to say. We at TiVo know this is a real behavior, not a hypothetical scenario, since our viewers have been clicking on Interactively Tagged ads for years, and doing so of their own volition, not because we threatened to clamp their bandwidth or turn off their service.

As we start to introduce the Click into TV advertising lexicon, the knee jerk reaction is to immediately compare the Click that a viewer makes with his remote to the Click that a web user performs with her mouse. Why is that? Because on the web, the Click is king, and despite recent senior executive repudiation, it is the Click that allowed the web to expand at an unprecedented rate as an advertising platform. The Click shifted the conversation away from promises and projections and landed it firmly into the context of performance and results - and Advertisers love performance and results. So here we are, just over a decade later, and digital is rapidly climbing to the top of the ad spend pile.

It's easy to draw parallels, but I think it's more important that we dig into the nuances of what makes these two Clicks different, because while similarities will help with acceptance and adoption, it is the differences that will ultimately inform the comparative value (basic inventory issues notwithstanding).

Here are a few factors to get the comparative analysis conversation going:

Level of Attentiveness - the viewers that clicked on something on their TV sets are attentively focused on the screen. There is a well defined action-reaction dynamic, characterized by the eye-tracking studies that show that when viewers click the remote, their eyes are firmly fixed on the center of the TV screen. Many would argue that web viewers have a similar attention level when they click on banner ads or search results, but both comparable eye-tracking research and anecdotal evidence point to a much lower level of focused attention and a greater propensity to scan (left-to-right, top-to-bottom), or simply to continue clicking.

Message Receptivity - the ability of TV viewers to receive and digest complex messages is legendary, and is in part responsible for TV's dominance of the ad marketplace. It's reasonable to assume that post-click message receptivity will continue to be at least as high, and some would say even higher, than linear TV, since the viewer actively opted into this message and is therefore more likely to be receptive to its contents. Web users are certainly receptive to messages, but on a much smaller scale. A few animated graphics are not comparable to empathy-inducing sight-sound-and-motion piped through the TV.

Complexity of the environment - the TV screen is characterized by a singularity that's unheard of in the web space. There is a single window, no tabs, hyper-navigation is highly controlled, and the viewer is only really looking at one thing at a time. Multiple screens just don't work in TV viewing (sports aside) - just ask the guys who invented Picture-In-Picture how brisk their business is today. So a Click on TV happens in a clean, uncluttered, simple environment when compared to the web or just about any other medium.

Taking the above in sum, it appears that the Click that happens on TV is significantly different in nature than a web Click.

So as we collectively follow the headlines, expand our conversation around tactics and executions, learn more about evolving TV viewer behavior, and instinctively draw parallels between interactive TV and online, let's not forget that a Click on TV is really so much more valuable than just about any Click on the Web.

Mark Risis is Director of Interactive Advertising Sales for TiVo, Inc.