Interactive television shows enormous promise, a test by AT&T showed.
AT&T Broadband investigated how cable consumers behaved with iTV. The test, conducted from October 2000 to March 2001 in Waterloo, IA, proved that “90% of customers used the service at least once,” said Marc Favaro, vice president of national advertising at AT&T Broadband. And, they used their remote to click on ads and programming when offered the opportunity.
During the test period, some 25 to 30 ads were aired each week on behalf of six advertisers.
Ads were the typical commercials enabled for iTV. For example, an ad for Kraft Foods showed a young man digging through the half-rotten groceries in his refrigerator, then frying up a head of lettuce. A button on-screen said click here for recipes on what you have in the house. When viewers click through they are shown a Web site on which they can type in the three ingredients they have on-hand and receive a recipe.
Nearly 40% of households used the hyperlinked area, said Favaro. The area they spent the most time in after hyper-linking was the “walled garden”–a place where they could choose interactive programming such as local weather, news, sports, or other programming. Some 36% of viewers used the walled garden area each week.
“Subscribers have embraced this technology, it holds great potential,” Favarro concluded.
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