ITV Experimentation in U.S. Markets Slow But Sure - interactive television - Brief Article

Brandweek, April 16, 2001 by Jennifer Owens

What will it take for interactive television to gain a foothold in North America? According to a small panel of experts that gathered last week in New York, the answer begins with continuing experimentation and small successes.

Invited by Agency.com, a New York-based i-shop that launched its own North American iTV practice about two months ago, the group considered what it will take to make iTV a success in this country.

"As we look out to the iTV landscape in North America, and look back on where it's come from, to me it seems as if we're in a constant state of 'getting started,'" said Tim Larcombe, who recently arrived in the United States from Visionik, a Danish iTV company bought by Agency.com in 1999, to head the i-shop's North American practice. "There are lots of announcements, heralded and dispatched like some bloody Roman epic, but they never really seem to get going."

That's because like anything, said Tom Watson, vice chairman of Omnicom, which owns a stake in Agency.com, "you've got to start small and look for some successes."

That has been the approach at ESPN, which in February conducted its first major iTV test in 2.5 million homes using three service providers: Wink, Commerce.TV and RespondTV. "Technically it worked," said Sean Bratches, ESPN senior vice president.

While iTV certainly isn't a big revenue business today, "we see it as an opportunity to walk into an agency, and from a leadership standpoint, play in this space and participate with advertisers that are spending millions and millions of dollars with us," said Bratches. "So when this does develop as a business, we are a partner from the beginning."

Bratches said ESPN is now talking with a number of its top multiple system operators (MSOs) "to write software to make things work in local markets to test [iTV]. And I should say it's a test, because we're going to launch in specific markets of our top MSOs this year." Additionally, ESPN is developing an interactive television channel, called ESPN Today and launching May 7 on DirecTV, which will allow users to navigate through deeper statistics in a manner similar to clicking through a Web page.

In the meantime, not every show is ready for interactivity, cautioned Johnathon Leess, who until recently headed up ABC's profitable Enhanced Television Division. "We did not do two-screens for every show that ABC and ESPN produced," he said. "We picked Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire... and the reason we did that is because those were TV shows that could produce interactivity for the TV show."

Said Leess, "People didn't tune into the TV show to interact with the TV commercials. They tuned in to watch the TV show. They turned on their computer to interact with that TV show and hey, what happened? There was interactive advertising slid in and the advertiser enjoyed that, especially the data and results they got, even though it was just a start."