It appears that most of the agencies who advertise during online television programming have decided that their ads have to “do that interactive stuff” to be effective.  Maybe it's their attempt to measure the impact of their marketing efforts.  Maybe they don't think it's important for their clickable commercials to engage viewers with something they care about.  They're using the interactive internet backwards.

Watching old episodes of “Lost” provided me with my first example of interaction without engagement.  When the commercial break came, a car started driving through New York, but stopped after 5 seconds.  A number of opportunities for me to “learn more” about the car's different features popped up.  “Why in the world would I want click on those links to find out about this car?” I thought.  I was afraid they might take me to another website and force me to lose the progress of my episode.  No way was I going to interact.

The next opportunity for interactivity turned out to be a Sprint ad.  It was Christmas, and Sprint figured that I'd be engaged by wanting to decorate a gingerbread man with the different possible colors and decorating tools they offered.  It might have said something about Sprint's cellphone plans, but I don't remember.  What I do remember is that the decorating cools were so difficult to use I couldn't get anything to happen by the time the 30 second break was over.  I felt frustrated, kind of like I do when dealing with Sprint's customer service. 

Sprint not only didn't learn from its mistaken attempt at internet advertising, it continued to offer different variations of difficult to operate games.  One was a tree decorating thing that didn't work well.  My favorite was a snowball fight where I had to adjust the angle and throwing distance perfectly to hit the computer before the computer knocked my character down.  If I hadn't been so stinking competitive I would have never figured out the tiny, magic part of the screen that could hit the computer's character.  Even then I could rarely win.  There wasn't even a prize or coupon for playing!  The message?  When dealing with Sprint, they always win and you get nothing. 

Lost on all these advertisers is the simple fact that I don't interact one bit while watching the programming I've chosen.  The content of the program engages me without my clicking of any buttons.  I only interacted in order to navigate my way there.  I could care less about answering a Lexus or Stouffer's quiz to tell them what just happened in their commercial.  Will someone tell me something about themselves that I care about?

I've seen one internet commercial that I liked.  It was made by Target, played cool music and told me about an upcoming sale and all the quality merchandise they had in the store.  I had no need to get anything at Target, but I watched the commercial and thought about how much more I liked Target than Wal-Mart.  Unfortunately, they played that commercial at every break.  By the time my show was over I didn't want to ever hear that commercial again.

Engaging the viewer with the power of your message and finding new ways to repeat that message will always be the number one priority of advertising.  It doesn't matter how much technology changes the vehicle with which it's delivered.  If you can't communicate something the audience cares about you might as well use your dollars to provide enjoyable content and just say “sponsored commercial free by...”  That at least would communicate the message that your company understands that what I want most of all is to watch an interesting program without too many annoying distractions.

Read About Peter Nevland