“We’re looking at the death of the ‘TV-comes-first’ model, definitely,”
Lee Daley, chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi UK, 2005

And yet TV is still the dominant entertainment medium is western society. Almost all households in Europe and US have access to terrestrial (and soon to be digital) TV. It’s cheap and it’s available everywhere while broadband Is still only available to around 12% of Europe and only in built-up areas of the US.

According to figures from BBC, TV consumption is actually up on previous years and, in other polls, TV is stated as the resource “most likely to be missed”, way above internet access. So it can’t be a lack of interest in video entertainment that’s causing the demise.

A decent digital TV set is considerably less than the price of the cheapest laptop and consumers are still buying and watching TV with around 40% of UK households owning more than one TV set. So it can’t be any barriers to entry or a lack of demand that’s seeing the decline in TV advertising.

Affordable PVRs like SkyPlus and FreeView+ still have low market penetration but they give viewers the ability to skip the ads; the worst possible scenario for ad agencies. Coupled with consumers’ increasing awareness of how to “play” marketing and the high benchmarks set by Experiential Marketing where businesses provide, you know, a good service and experience to their customers.

We Love TV

But the single biggest impact on TV (and newspaper) advertising has been the internet and the various forms of digital marketing. Traditional ad agencies (Ogilvy / WPP are not alone here) just don’t get digital. In a recent conversation with another top ten agency, the creative director confidently revealed to me that “you can do some great stuff with banner ads” and thought that an integrated approach to digital meant a microsite to go with the banners. Their recent stab at social media marketing constituted a MySpace page which nobody ever updated so the message board rapidly declined into a directory of porn site. Nice one fellas, good bit of brand management on that one.

Digital, when handled correctly, enables a more accountable, more measurable and, in many ways, more focused campaign strategy. While it’s reach, in terms of numbers, falls far below that of TV (and will remain so for many years to come) the quality of the viewers and their willingness to engage, rather than passively observe, is still to be adequately evaluated. The quality of engagement through digital channels, the communities and the ability to action consumer feedback in minutes just aren’t available in the un-hearing, one-way model of broadcast advertising.

But let’s not write-off TV advertising yet. It’s a lack of understanding, imagination and vision that are killing it, not the format itself. Concurrent viewing, where the viewing audience is surfing the web while watching, switching attention between TV and Internet is on the rise. It’s also growing rapidly with more web-enabled Mobile devices and affordable data packages, concurrent viewing will increase more rapidly in the next 2 years… Assuming agencies bother to make sites that work on mobile.

And in Two years, do you what will happen then? We do. And we’ve been working with a consortium of broadcasters including the BBC to prototype and develop the next generation TV, and it’s web-enabled. Project “Canvas”

Do you see where I’m going here? Is it obvious yet? TV may not lead the field any more but it is still a powerful influencer in an integrated campaign strategy. And pretty soon, with the right people in charge, it could be more powerful than ever.

A campaign that uses the best of broadcast & online, that integrates the two and that allows two-way feedback on both platforms, will provide a much more powerful, measurable and effective result.

ColdCut's Let Us Play

Enhanced CDs took music out of the Hi-Fi and into the home PC with it’s exciting new CD-Rom drive full of multimedia goodness. Coldcut’s “Let Us Play” and AudioRom’s BAFTA award-winning “ShiftControl” showed the amazing artistic possibilities of the medium, while bands such as Muse, Ash and Garbage demonstrated their commercial potential with ground breaking examples of user generated content, music mixers, interactive video tools and games. And then came DVD with it’s superior video capabilities, the exodus from CD to mp3 and the emergence of Shockwave and rich-media on the internet which all contributed the death of the Enhanced CD as a format and, sadly, as a way of engaging with an audience.

Fast forward 10 years to the present day and the new consumers’ demand for interaction has exploded beyond all expectations. Consumers now expect to have greater influence on their purchases, even more so in times of credit crunch when buying decisions are more crucial, Music artists & distributors are beginning to see the benefits of engaging their consumers in a conversation, a narrative or a social element or two.

Into the engagement gap has stepped a most unlikely contender, the iPhone App, which has secretly been re-kindling the potential of the enhanced CD, with some exciting differences. iPhone Applications such as Brian Eno’s “Bloom”, an uncluttered and elegant slice of generative sonic art, show the artistic potential of the iPhone, while the Snow Patrol app shows the commercial potential, in this case contextualised as an interactive version of the CD booklet. The entertainment industry have been swift to follow suit with the far more mundane but hugely popular Quantum of Solace iPhone App.

Brian Eno

Brian Eno’s Bloom is an interesting example of the artistic potential. Bloom is a relatively simple, yet very elegant piece of generative sonic art. There are many free browser based sonic artworks online, discovereable via sites such as soundtoys.net, the big difference being that the iPhone makes it much more convenient and rewarding for both the end user and the creator. As the iPhone is a mobile device the end user can play with Bloom virtually anywhere and even better on a device that is designed as both a music and video player. It’s great for the creator as thanks to the fantastic app store, it is very easy to find and most importantly buy sonic artworks, thereby providing a very hard to come by revenue stream for digital art.

Snow Patrol

The Snow Patrol iPhone app is an example of the commercial potential and is very reminiscent of the commercial enhanced CDs from the late 90s. It is contextualised as an interactive booklet to accompany the mp3s, providing video interviews and the song lyrics. The potential of this form is really exciting, as it can also act as a piece of marketing and could show off pop videos, photographs and other promotional content as well as driving sales through an on device click through to the iTunes store.

With a few notable exceptions, most Enhanced CDs were one-way, a monologue between band and fan. The iPhone and those that are following its lead with internet connectivity and easy interfaces, have the potential to open the door to the connected, web2.0, mobile-enabled youth market. Multi-participant dialogues, live fan-to-fan communities, instant access to video interviews and secret gigs are just a tap away, granting swathes of kudos to the participants.

Reaching consumers in this increasingly fragmented, personalized environment has become more complex and publishers have been forced to rethink the ways they reach & communicate with consumers. In a fractured distribution environment an integrated multi-channel digital approach pays dividends by putting your name in more places at the same time, increasing visibility, access and, thereby, marketing opportunities. Mobile is only one part of any integrated strategy but the iPhone, as a mobile music and video player, provides a ready-made revenue stream through it’s direct on-device link to iTunes and the App Store.

At Do Tank Studios we are so excited about the commercial potential for interactive music applications for iPhone and iPod touch that we have started to develop some of our own. If you like the idea of remixing your favourite Girls Aloud track on the bus, sharing stories of gigs with other fans around the world on a geo-located-socially-enabled fan site, or that crowd-sourced pop-promos could capture a generation, then your probably thinking along the same lines as us. If this could benefit you in anyway then get in touch, either publicly via the comments or privately via our contact form box on the right.

When you give people tools, they tend to use them, even if they make something you weren’t originally expecting. One of the most recent example of this are the groups of young revellers who have taken to “dipping”. Dipping involves using Google maps’ satellite imagery to locate local homes with swimming pools then organising a party and heading on over for an impromptu gate-crashing.

Imagine the irony if one of the homes that falls prey to the pool-crashers belongs to a brand manager or marketeer, coming home after a day of desperately trying to engage the youth market in their brand, only to find a garden strewn with beer cans and their target market frantically cycling away from the scene.