Digital Television as Persuasive Technology
The advent of digital television technologies will rapidly expand viewer interaction with computer-mediated television. This paper reports on research demonstrating how new computer-mediated TV advertising models, including iTV microsites and telescopic a
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Abstract. The advent of digital television technologies will rapidly expand viewer interaction with computer-mediated television. This paper reports on research demonstrating how new computer-mediated TV advertising models, including iTV microsites and telescopic ads, are superior to their linear counterparts. The authors argue that, in part, such superiority may result from the degree to which interactivity heightens mental engagement (facilitating a shift from peripheral to central message processing) and empowers viewer choice, thereby positively predisposing viewers to the persuasive content they encounter. The authors warn of potential negative fallout, however, where viewer expectations are not met. Although there might be potential ‘distraction’ effects associated with processing both video and interactive layered content, testing among college students demonstrated no adverse effects associated with such concurrent message processing. The opportunities associated with further research in this new arena of captology are explored.
1 Introduction A wide confluence of factors including both channel and platform multiplication, audience fragmentation and the evolution of new audience metrics are ushering in a period of significant market disruption for the television industry. The advent of digital technologies, including digital video recorders (DVRs), internet protocol television (IPTV), interactive television (iTV), portable video (across iPods, mobile phones and a range of other portable devices), video-on-demand (VOD), high definition (HD) and digital television (DTV) are rapidly accelerating the industry’s changing dynamic. As countries around the world increasingly mandate analog shut-off dates, facilitating a switch-over to digital television (for the US this date is set for 2009), public access to such digital platforms will expand dramatically. Although many dimensions of these new digital platforms capitalize on the traditional strengths of linear TV, the ability of such systems to facilitate user interaction and choice positions television’s new frontier as perhaps another unique front among evolving persuasive technologies. This paper draws on research supervised by the authors to explore how framing television’s new frontier as a ‘persuasive technology’ may help better visualize new opportunities associated with the medium. The authors are currently engaged in a large research project exploring this theme further which has, as its sponsors, many of Y. de Kort et al. (Eds.): PERSUASIVE 2007, LNCS 4744, pp. 243–252, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
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D. Varan and S. Bellman
the world’s leading advertising brands and media networks including the ABC, Coca-Cola, Comcast, DirecTV, ESPN, General Motors, Kelloggs, Kraft, McDonalds, Masterfoods/Mars, Microsoft, NBC, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Turner Broadcasting, TV Guide, Verizon, Visa, and Warner Bros. among others. Although the findings associated with this research are currently bound by non-disclosure obligations (part of an 18-month
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