Schroedinger's cat

Over the past few months, anyone reading the trade press, will have noticed that ‘exciting things’ are happening in the world of interactive TV. Service providers are getting nearer to providing a high enough level of interactivity and some have begun communicating with subscribers encouraging them to participate.

Yet - in a way that we’ve all come to know so painfully well in the new media - in spite of the talk there is still no action. Does anyone know anyone who’s responded to an iTV ad?

I’m not even sure any more who interactive advertising is for. Service providers seem to think it might interest viewers or advertisers. The agencies can’t see a way to make a profit out of it. The advertisers are quite sensibly wondering why they should be asked to fund the experiments when they can go straight to advertiser funded programming, sponsorship or get on the phone to Jamie Oliver’s agent for a bit of discreet product placement. The viewers can’t work out why they’d bother spending time exploring the brand values of a biscuit when they’d be missing part three of the Beach Volleyball quarter-finals on NudeSport™.

Fifteen years ago, I was working for a TV company when I saw my first demo of an interactive TV commercial. It involved a regular BMW ad with a button that clicked the viewer through to web pages. In the room, at the time, was a spectacularly dim airtime sales bloke. He was in his fifties, deeply conservative, faintly malodorous and had only kept his job through his ability to match the client drink for drink without forgetting to get the order signed. He wore a grey suit of abiding ghastliness in some revolting manmade fibre and a Teflon tie redolent of vomit. Let’s call him Reg.

‘Won’t work’ said Reg.

Putting on my best net guru sneer, I prepared to verbally flay the blinkered relic for his reactionary, Luddite naysaying.

‘If the punters are buggering about with this, I’ll never sell the next ad in the break’.

I fell uncharacteristically silent. That simple fact has remained unchallenged for fifteen years. I call it ‘Reg’s Law’.

I must have seen a presentation like that, on average four times a year, ever since. Different service providers, web agencies trying to break into iTV, the occasional visionary TV production company – everyone has had a go.  Almost always a BMW ad (plenty of background information to fill the pages and some useful figures for internet purchase I suppose) with a different colour or shape of button and a variety of back end structures. Currently the trades are awash with stories about the latest innovation in interactivity and every now and then a service provider will manage to hook up with an advertiser and an agency and put out a PR generating experimental ad.

But at no point has the basic temporal anomaly of ‘Reg’s Law’ been addressed - the viewer’s attention can’t be in two places at once.

I’m sure there’s an answer to this. Somewhere between Schroedinger’s Cat and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle will be a rigorously argued thought experiment that proves one can, simultaneously observe two phenomena without poisoning Tiddles.

Agencies and service providers have signally failed to get a grip on this, but who can blame them, last time I looked, Stephen Hawking had quit working with the towering intellects of advertising and had gone back to quantum mechanics.