This week’s "Your Shot" is excerpted from a keynote address delivered at the Myers Conference, a two-day gathering to discuss new media, held recently in New York .
We expect a future where iTV will start small, and then flood across the planet. It will change television, the Internet, commerce and human culture just about everywhere it reaches. In other words: everywhere. It seems as if the real question is, "How fast?" This is the Rollout Question, the Deployment Question—the Practical Question, with a thousand business decisions hanging on the answer. "How fast?" is the Big Question.
For now. But it won’t be the Big Question for long. And it’s not the most important question.
The Big Question has changed before. In the mid-1950s, the young medium of television was rocked to its core by a simple invention—the remote control. As a result, advertisers and programmers were forced to make the programs and commercials better. They found themselves scrambling to provide a new, higher level of entertainment value story—so that viewers wouldn’t click away.
The big question didn’t turn out to be, "When will there be 10 million remote controls out there so we can start to prepare?" The big question was more like, "How can we take advantage of that change?"
One thing that’s clear is that the viewer experience will have to drive the future of iTV technology. If iTV doesn’t provide viewers with a great experience, they will go away. Moreover, the advertisers, the carriers and all the other interested parties—the parties paying the bills—will have a new, precise way of keeping score. Everyone in the industry is going to know exactly when a viewer clicks away.
I spent the entire decade of the ’90s working with senior executives at high tech companies, helping them to compete more effectively in a rapidly expanding global marketplace. As a result, I was fortunate to have an inside view, and I learned a great deal about industries in transition. The successful companies—those which survived in that fiercely competitive environment—were the companies that understood market forces, their competition and customer expectations, both current and projected. I think it’s quite likely that customer experience will again prove to be the most useful baseline: The customer’s viewpoint is a reliable reference point in an evolving landscape.
A practical example of this came up last year. I was working with a large, well-established computer company. Its business problem was that it was being outpaced and outperformed by competitors. The centerpiece of our solution was to build a set of Web-enabled capabilities for selling and delivering products and services. We created a global virtual organization including the company’s industry partnerships and alliances. As part of our ROI analysis, in addition to identifying the incremental cost reductions and additional revenue benefit streams, we were going to take accountability for the customer experience (which, by the way, had been pretty abysmal, given technology and organizational issues).
When we conducted our first pilot sessions, and the customers got their first look at these global, Web-enabled capabilities, they weren’t all that impressed. The reason for their reaction was that, although these capabilities were global and robust, they made more sense to the organization than they did to the customers. So we made sure that the next iteration of the Web-enabled capabilities focused specifically on personalization technology. Only the products and services that were useful to the customers were reflected in what they experienced. And that worked!
We can learn from other industries. We can and will build the most advanced iTV technology possible. The requirements are clear: technology that’s simple to use, fail-safe and reliable, with easy navigation that allows the viewer a quick return to the familiar TV experience.
But the fact is, a great viewer experience with inferior technology will win every time over a mediocre viewer experience with superior technology!
We at Random/Order often hear the same first question from advertisers, ad agencies, and networks: It’s usually a variant of, "What are the real deployment numbers?" or, "When will we absolutely hit critical mass?" These are logical questions, but the lessons of the past indicate that waiting for certainty before starting serious development efforts will result in watching the parade instead of being in the parade. The "play it safe" strategy is perhaps appropriate for some companies. But others— especially companies that rely on TV advertising to protect huge brand assets—simply can’t afford to play it safe. In this case, playing it safe is too dangerous. Developing sophisticated iTV strategies will yield a competitive advantage as iTV happens—and that does mean starting now.
We saw a demonstration of just how seriously a leading network—in this case, ABC—is taking the interactivity challenge. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is a huge hit on regular television, as well as in its interactive PC application. But that dual-screen application can serve as a springboard to a single-platform, true iTV program. Its developers have created it for a seamless transition—as soon as it’s practical.
"When it gets here, what will we do with it?"
The answer should provide reasons for viewers to interact and to keep coming back. The future of iTV—technologically and experientially—depends, ultimately, upon the depth of invention that goes into answering that question … and upon our ability to meet the expectations of numerous and diverse audiences of one.
It’s what fascinates us, and it’s what will create the first interactive hit shows, as well as the first memorable iCommer-cials. Those hits will reshape the business models, and will reshape television.
