Sky today announced that it’s to drop red button advertising, which, as you may have worked out for yourself, is what you get when you see a red icon over a 30” TV advert and press the red button on your TV remote control.
Chances are, you’ve never bothered doing so. To be honest, you haven’t missed much. And I say that as someone who worked in red button advertising for just over a year after leaving the BBC. I started off as an enthusiast, but gradually realized that it would simply never work. About a tenth of the viewing public is prepared to wait for up to ten seconds to access red button content attached to certain types of programming – mainly live sports coverage. But they won’t wait that long to get to whatever is lurking behind an advert.
Why not?
Well, when you press red during Wimbledon or the Olympics (on the BBC) you tend to get heaps of extra live coverage: four extra matches or four extra events if you’re watching on Sky – fewer on Freeview. The BBC essentially turns one channel covering an individual event into five. (Sky also does this for some sports.) Why wouldn’t you want that sort of choice, especially when it doesn’t cost you anything?
With TV advertising, you may get a bit of extra video – but is it ever really worth the wait? An advert is something to be endured: why would anyone actually want to expand the experience? I used to argue that whatever advertisers stuck up behind the red button needed to be better than the actual advert. If red button advertising was ever to catch on, the content it offered needed to be an unexpected delight. Honda managed this well: most other brands offered viewers a deeply uninspiring experience.
Besides, the problem with watching a commercial channel is that by the time you’ve switched away from the main broadcast stream, consumed some extra content, and switched back, you’ve probably missed a sizable chunk of the next programme or segment. Why would anyone be willing to do that?
But, even leaving aside these problems, the sheer stultifying lack of interest in this new medium by advertising agencies, allied to a lack of creative oomph on the part of the broadcasters who were offering the service – not to mention the sheer cost of the bandwidth required to broadcast extra video and to create the software applications necessary for any content to be displayed and accessed - meant that it cost too much to reach too few people.
Mind you, the same is true of linear advertising. It is an hilariously expensive, uncertain and unmeasurable means of getting a marketing message across to potential customers. The whole of the TV advertising industry appears to be built on a fantasy – and any attempt to change it tends to be met with the sort of determined resistance last demonstrated by Russians at Stalingrad: an awful lot of careers and mortgages and private school fees depend on the old system of shouting like Barry Scott at a supposedly captive TV audience (who, research demonstrates, will do almost anything during an advert break except watch the adverts).
Advertising’s resistance to change is almost admirable: I remember in the mid-Noughties sitting through several research presentations purporting to demonstrate that (a) Personal Video Recorders weren’t really that popular, (b) most PVR owners barely watched the programmes they recorded (c) most viewers enjoyed the adverts and didn’t choose to fast-forward through them even when they could, and (d) an increase in people watching previously-recorded programmes would, magically, lead to an increase in the number of adverts they watched (eagerly, it goes without saying).
This, of course, was all tosh. With or without PVRs, TV advertising has fallen off a cliff in recent years, while advertisers pile online, where there’s some chance of measuring the effect of marketing spend.
The demise of red button advertising is mainly due to the immense unpopularity and ineffectiveness of TV advertising itself – there’s little point in offering the public more of what they didn’t want in the first place. But another major factor was the sheer clunkiness of the medium.
The problem for interactive TV, right from the start, was the miserable lack of processing power of the set-top boxes. This meant that no matter how cleverly broadcasters coded their applications, there was always an irreducible minimum time required by the anorexic box to get that content up on the screen. Given that switching channels has always been a near-instant activity, a wait of anywhere between 5 and 20 seconds can seem like a lifetime – especially if you lose the programme you were watching and have to sit staring at a still picture for most of that time.
Despite that, when red button programming or straight information services like BBCi (the digital version of dear old Ceefax) have been done well, they have prospered: unsurprisingly, viewers will put up with a brief hiatus if they’re certain of getting a reward. And reward them the BBC’s interactive teams continue to do.
But I’ll leave that topic for another day.
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