To stay competitive in the face of Internet advertising, TV broadcasters are offering interactive television (iTV) commercials that use Internet-like applications, such as games, quizzes and extended video content, but adapted for the boob tube. Viewers are typically enticed into an iTV "experience" by a Pop-Up Video-style button that appears during a traditional spot.

What is it?
ITV ads have appeared on several platforms, from satellite to cable and TiVO. Though a digital set top box is required, there is no "one size fits all" ad application that conforms to cable providers' differing technologies. Earlier this year, eight broadcasters formed Canoe Ventures, a consortium headed by former Aegis Media Americas CEO David Verklin, to create a standardized iTV platform.

Where do I begin?
Agencies will typically partner with an iTV service company to design an app. Ideally, that company should come on board early in the creative development process. When Wieden+Kennedy decided to make iTV part of a global Nike Zoom campaign in 2007, the agency approached Portland-based Ensequence.

"Our team built the architecture and the wireframe that all of their creative content was brought into," says Michele Bogdan, SVP of marketing for Ensequence. "We can allow a creative team to create an application once and deploy it across multiple platforms."

What should I do?
TV viewers aren't going to dig as deep as web surfers, says W+K executive interactive producer Marcelino Alvarez, so key information must be easily accessed by only a few simple clicks of the remote. For Nike Zoom, the iTV ad starred San Diego Chargers running back Ladainian Tomlinson. Viewers could watch training demos of Tomlinson's signature moves, play a quickness game or locate nearby retail outlets selling Nike shoes. Viewers with DVRs could access up to 22 minutes of content.

"You're really designing a website for what the web looked like five or six years ago," says Alvarez. "Then you strip a lot of the bells and whistles."

For the production team, iTV requires small-screen thinking, meaning lots of close-up shots for a standard 4x3 aspect ratio. On the web, scrubbing a Phantom camera-shot video of LT's signature move was easy, but for iTV, the sequence had to be rendered in eight different speeds, which viewers controlled with their remote controls, like the fast-forward and rewind features on a DVD.

The result
Ensequence's Bogdan says people generally interact for two to three minutes but some spent up to nine minutes playing with the Nike app. She estimates the potential audience on DISH and DirecTV to be 30 million.

What to watch out for
Alvarez says production costs are like those for a video-enhanced website, but testing the user interface is an issue. "With a website you can send the URL to everyone on the team. We had to set aside time to go down to Ensequence to test it out on one of their boxes." Design, development and testing took about two months.

The lingo
"Addressable TV" is a sub-genre of iTV that takes demographic or behavioral data to customize and target content. While the technology is still in its nascent state, companies such as NY-based Visible World are luring advertisers such as Lenovo and Sears with its potential. The Nike Zoom campaign's store locater, which used zip codes, could also be considered "addressable". KR

Ensequence http://www.ensequence.com
Wieden+Kennedy http://www.wk.com
Visible World http://www.visibleworld.com