I was recently talking with a very talented director named Rocky Morton (of bicoastal Morton Jankel Zander), about the fact that a new survey of TiVo owners reported that 88 percent of them fast-forward through the recorded commercials. Mr. Morton had an interesting response. In a thick Cockney accent he excitedly pronounced, "I want to shoot a beautiful, five-minute, slow-motion commercial, so when those Tivo bastards fast-forward through it, they are treated to a brilliant little 30-second spot!"
What a concept! Not the idea of five-minute, slow-speed commercials aimed at TiVo audiences—although that idea is hilarious. What’s astounding is that a longtime, established commercial director is thinking of creating a spot for new technologies. Now, if only traditional agency creatives were thinking like this.
Television commercials are, and will for a long time be, the most powerful form of advertising. Story-driven ads have the power to make an emotional connection with the intended audience. Advertisers are now challenged to extend that story to multiple media outlets. The problem is that creative teams are not thinking outside the box.
Interactive TV, Flash animation, streaming video and even TiVo present enormous opportunities for advertisers to increase audience share. It’s too bad that when a spot is boarded, shot and shipped, the client then asks the question, "How can we re-purpose this spot for interactivity?" (See The Wall Street Journal, "Unilever to Run TV Spots in Digitized Form, Online," 3/2/01.) Forget digitizing and re-purposing. Agencies and production companies need to "pre-purpose."
I must give full credit to Robin Raj at San Francisco agency Collaborate for coining this term "pre-purposing." Robin and I worked together on a campaign for Rock the Vote in which his creatives had the brilliant idea of creating a broadcast spot that would translate nicely as an interactive piece. As a result, the San Francisco-based production company Pandemonium was handed storyboards for broadcast, interactive TV, Flash, and streaming video. An entire integrated campaign was produced that essentially "mega-dupled" the broadcast audience, and sent viewers from the TV spots, superstitials and in-stream ads to a voter registration site. And guess what? The unregistered voters became registered voters.
The most improbable aspect of the entire campaign was that the director and designer of those spots, Richard Kizu-Blair (of Pandemonium) and Tuesday McGowen (of Western Images, San Francisco), respectively, intimately collaborated with the online teams during production and post to create the interactive campaign. (Mekanism is a joint venture of Pandemonium and Western Images.) A singular idea was concepted, pitched, budgeted, shot and delivered tailored specifically for the Internet, interactive TV and television.
So you see, it’s not about convergence. It’s really about divergence. What a concept!
