Adventures In Digital Marketing

A lot of buzz going on right now about Yahoo! and it’s several hardware partners (which include heavyweights like Sony and Samsung) moving closer and closer to the launch of the “Yahoo! Connected TV” platform – a combination of HDTV hardware (like you probably have right now in your house) and some extras, seemingly from Intel and Yahoo!, which allow the TV to display widgets, pulling in various snippets of internet content, right on the TV screen itself alongside the usual programming and shows.

Since Yahoo! purchased Konfabulator some years ago, I’ve not really seen them do anything outstanding with the engine that the likes of Microsoft and Google were not doing with their own Widget and Gadget platforms.

This to me seems like the first major step in widget evolution since apple really decided to build it right into the OS with Dashboard, making it common place for all mac users and then windows users as MS followed suit and built it into Vista.

What is exciting about this though is it’s not a PC.  It’s not a Mac.  It’s not some techy “add-on” perceived by the masses to be geeky – it’s built right in there to the TV.  The device most people interact with on a daily basis for several hours.

Because of this, Connected TV is designed to be user friendly by the average Joe consumer from the ground up.

Use your remote to bring up the TV Widget Dock, select all your favorite TV Widgets, and connect to popular Internet services and online media, while you watch your favorite show.

Making it hopefully as easy for users to get access to widgets as it is to switch over to Celebrity Big Brother.

As digital marketers we’ve been trying to capitalise on the wide distribution, easy development, and very focused audience groups that widgets provide for some time – with varying degrees of success – but the big problem has always been that widget use is restricted to a niche audience who are generally highly technical.  It’s never been a mainstream media channel.

Connected TV could just change all of this, and if it becomes a standard, built in to all TVs that the likes of LG, Sony and Samsung create (I don’t think it will be initially – it’ll be an added cost extra for sure) then people will hopefully get as used to using widgets (even forgetting that they are widgets and simply regarding them as part of TV) on a normal daily basis.

If that were to happen, then as digital marketers we would have a huge new environment with which to target consumers.

I also wonder what this connected platform would mean for segmentation and targetted advertising?  Maybe nothing – but I wonder if they’ve thought about pushing ads to people?  Hopefully not – thinking about it it would be amazingly intrusive to get an overlay banner for the new series of Lost popping up during the latest episode of Heroes!  Scratch that – it’d suck

But -widgets are good – they’re user accessed when they want them.

We like that.

Upon launch it looks like the platform will contain content, naturally, from a key selection of Yahoo! properties like Flickr, and some other 3rd party partners like Blockbuster, Ebay and Twitter (how cool is that!).  But, there’s also an API that any developer can tap into to make widgets for the platform – meaning it’s open to all of us – which is just great from the start (So, Apple, missing something with the AppleTV yet??)

Yahoo! – please please deliver the goods on this.

Oh, and Microsoft?  You might want to check out the sweet user interface that this platform has compared to WIndows 7 Media Center (which isn’t being shown AGAIN at CES? We get no love in the Media Center community??)  Yahoo! makes you look stupid in terms of visual design and usability over a TV interface!

Howard