Talking Back to the TV
Couch potatoes can now become active consumers without ever putting down the remote. Enhanced TV – advertising with promotional offers that consumers redeem via remote control – is catching on with CPGs, automakers, financial services, and restaurant chains. Regional tests from two companies will expand this year, and a quarter of cable-wired households could have enhanced TV by 2004.
Analysts predict there will be set-top boxes – appliances that route Internet access through TV cables – in eight to 10 million homes by 2002 and 25 million to 35 million homes by 2004. (They’re in about 600,000 homes now.) Insiders expect this year and next to be pivotal as hardware providers pilot test equipment in the second half of 2000 and marketers begin formal campaigns in 2001. “Three to five million set-top boxes will be enough to get most marketers jumping on,” says Richard Fisher, president of RespondTV, San Francisco.
Both RespondTV and Wink Communications, Alameda, CA, are vying for advertisers and programming partners for their services. Eighteen-month-old RespondTV uses Internet-based technology to seed URL addresses as triggers in TV programming. Each trigger appears as an icon on viewers’ screens; viewers click their remotes to see an offer – for information, a coupon, or a product sample – and respond. The system adds “a thin, elegant layer of interactivity” to existing TV spots, Fisher says.
To test the system, RespondTV ran a Domino’s Pizza promotion during August Star Trek Marathon on UPN’s San Francisco affiliate. RespondTV tagged Domino’s nine TV spots with an offer for free pizza and soft drinks, and 150 viewers responded. Granted, they were Trekkies, so were more inclined than the average viewer to type in their name and address via keyboard. (In the future, such household data will be stored within set-top boxes, so viewers won’t need to constantly type it in.)
Ford tested RespondTV in February 1999 as part of its sponsorship of the Grammys broadcast on ABC. In five cities, ads for the Focus compact car carried an offer for more information. Viewers typed in their e-mail addresses to get information packets by mail.
Wink launched in U.S. markets in June 1998, after a `96 launch in Japan. It reaches 100,000 cable TV households in eight states. Microsoft Corp. invested $30 million in Wink last June, and now owns 10 percent of the company.
General Motors, Kraft Foods, and Unilever begin airing interactive commercials this quarter. Procter & Gamble, Clorox Co., and Charles Schwab were first out of the Wink gate, running enhanced spots in first-quarter ’99. Wink signed deals with American Honda Motor Co. and The Walt Disney Co. in fourth-quarter ’99, and earlier with AT&T, DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Co., General Electric, Goodyear, Levi-Strauss, Paramount Pictures, Pfizer, Universal Pictures, and Wells Fargo.
TBS Superstation ran a fourth-quarter ’99 promo during its “15 Days of 007” Bond flick marathon, offering wrestling match updates, profiles on wrestlers, and trivia games. Thirteen percent of Wink-enabled households responded.
The jury’s still out on how enthusiastically packaged goods marketers will embrace enhanced TV services. P&G was one of the first to test Wink, but isn’t working with the company anymore, a P&G spokesperson says. The company’s European division is now pioneering most interactive TV applications for the company, she adds.
Clorox began using Wink in early ’99 to offer viewers a $1 off coupon for bleach, and will incorporate more brands this year. Clorox has been “pretty happy with Wink in general,” says director of media service Alain Zutter. The sample size is small. That’s a drawback, but it keeps costs down, so it’s not as risky to experiment with the technology.
