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Helen Katz and Dave Zornow
It's Saturday morning. Judy and John are in front of the TV waiting for their favorite character to appear. Each week they interact with the program, helping determine its outcome by deciding what happens as the good guys chase the bad guys.
Is this a possibility for our interactive TV future? No, it's a blast from our pre-cable past. It's 1955, and Winky Dink has invited children to put a translucent sheet up against the TV set and draw the direction the character should take.
Like many great but before-their-time ideas, this one had a few kinks in its execution. These interactive viewers did more than think outside the box - they drew there, too, and hundreds of parents complained to TV stations about crayon markings on their television screens. End of program.
Now fast-forward to the late 1990s when children are again interacting with their favorite TV shows. On Nickelodeon, Steve and his dog enchant pre-schoolers as they search for clues on Nick Jr.'s Blue's Clues. Without fancy gizmos and sophisticated technology, the concept is a big winner with kids because they are involved and excited while playing along as junior detectives.
As the hardware and infrastructure roll out to enable interactivity, media futurists speculate about how tomorrow's TV viewing environment will differ from what we see today. One way to project how future viewers will interact with TV is to study how the medium is used today.
Television's youngest viewers, who don't remember life without cable, CDs or the Internet, can give us insight into how TV will work into their lives when they are older. The media behaviors of kids and teens have dramatically changed TV, advertising and marketing during the last quarter of the 20th century. MTV's influence on advertising, creative, music and teen trends has been well-documented and widely publicized.
Kids younger than 12 have made their TV presence felt, as well. In the past 10 years, Nick has more than tripled its TV household rating on Saturday mornings (.7 to a 2.3) and increased its audience delivery by more than 400%. Saturday morning used to be a network TV institution; now only two broadcast networks even compete in this daypart, and Nick is widely recognized as a must-buy to reach the under-12 crowd.
Nick's success has spawned Cartoon Network, Discovery Kids and Noggin, just to name a few.
A new research study, "How Kids Use Media Technology," tells us how kids use TV today while giving us clues about what they will do in the future. The report, released by Westfield, N.J., radio and TV research firm SRI, says younger viewers may not make the same media distinctions adults do. For children in the year 2000, the worlds of TV and computers are quickly becoming one. Everything may not come from the same box, and the content may not always be the same, but, according to this study, there are parallels as to how both media are used.
- It's all on the tube, no matter how you use it: When kids are asked which medium they would choose if they could only select one, the TV and Internet were tied for first place. Telephone and radio followed in their rankings.
- Prime time is the right time: When asked what time of day they spend most of their time with each medium, respondents said both TV and the computer were used the most in the evening.
- Parents' rules still rule: When asked whether there were rules in place to limit or guide their TV or Internet usage, roughly the same proportion of children said they had rules governing both TV and Internet usage. Also, when asked about the nature of those rules, program content was the most commonly mentioned limit.
Click first. If all else fails, read for directions. SRI also asked kids how they decide what to watch on TV and where to surf online. Channel surfing is the second most common means for children to find the program they want to watch - more frequently cited than checking TV listings or listening to friends and family. The TV remote is being used in a manner similar to how we surf the Web, which is ironic since surfing the Internet is the least likely method used by children to find a Web site. SRI respondents cite word of mouth from friends and family as the No. 1 way they find Internet destinations.
Multi-tasking, but not media. TV viewing and Internet usage are distinctly different behaviors. TV remains a lean-back, passive experience, while the Net requires navigation and interactivity. SRI reports that two out of three kids say they often do something else while they watch TV (eat, talk on the phone, get ready for the day, etc.).
In contrast, only one-third say they are involved in another activity while using the computer. As for the infamous dual usage that has received so much press, SRI findings diverge with conventional wisdom. Only a quarter of the kids answering the SRI survey said that they have ever watched TV while online.
That doesn't mean old and new media don't ever cross paths. Nearly four in 10 children in the study said that once or twice a month they visited a Web site specifically because of something they had seen in a TV ad; one-quarter mentioned a TV program.
When will the future get here? Convergence is coming; it's just a matter of time. Media audiences will be lured to the pleasures of a multimedia, connected world through an array of technological temptations.
What's not clear is which products and services will be the winners. When AOL's Instant Messaging became a teen communication sensation, it changed the way online users of all ages communicate by providing an instant and "free" alternative to the telephone.
What will be the first successful convergence killer app? Possibilities include connecting to the Internet via the TV set through services like WorldGate, WebTV or Respond TV; the TV-over-Internet model, such as Geocast or ; or a new generation of cell phone may rule, given SRI's findings that about 13% of teens already have their own portable phones.
Cable, now a mature ad-supported medium, will need to develop new strategies to cope with an increasingly fragmented and interactive future. Will a proliferation of hundreds of digital niche channels increase viewing levels, or will tomorrow's sources only further cannibalize today's viewing levels?
Media planners are still reeling from the sudden impact of the Internet and are just beginning to grasp how the next communications generation will offer new opportunities and challenges for advertisers to reach consumers.
To deal with the new media order, media planners will need to morph into communication planners to determine the reach of new plans that involve TV, Internet and other bundled media vehicles.
At the same time, account executives will need to play a greater role as media sales consultants as their job descriptions change from single-medium salespeople to multimedia sellers. Increasingly, they will have to respond to requests that involve network and cable TV, radio, outdoor, Web sites and magazines.
Research is slowly moving in the right direction. Arbitron's new Personal Portable Meter (PPM), for example, uses a pager-size device to passively collect from the same people both radio and TV audio signals. Kantar Media is looking to combine multiple person-level databases to create multimedia optimizers. Today, Internet ad-serving networks like DoubleClick, MatchLogic and AdKnowledge can instantaneously serve each Web visitor a specific banner ad based on a user's historical profile. In the near future, research firms may be able to merge Internet click stream data with TV viewing information as consumers start watching television through the same device.
How Nielsen, or anyone else, will handle that magnitude of data, given the current challenges of providing reliable minute-by-minute information, remains to be seen. That may be the future challenge for the audience of Steve, his dog, Blue, and their audience of future media researchers and planners.
Good luck, kids. But remember not to write on the screen. You might just set us back another 45 years.
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