A Creative Communications Agency

It’s funny, I worked for a company called Interactive Media for four years and now I am a Director of Interactive Media. Yet when I mention those two words – interactive and media – to someone, I usually get asked the question “Well, what is Interactive Media?”

Here is the answer that all of you have been spending sleepless nights trying to figure out. Drum roll please…

I’m not quite sure.

Don’t be too dismayed, though, because as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.”

Wow! this is off to good start.

Allow me to digress. Interactive Media is made up of two words. You guessed it; Interactive and Media. Interactive means an exchange between two different sources. Intra-active, on the other hand, means exchanging with yourself. Uhh… I’m not sure why I added that. Let’s move on to media. Media can be a form on which content is held or displayed. Content is something that a consumer wants. It can be information, entertainment, or a business transaction. I hope you are all clear now. Thank you for reading.

Ok, maybe I can help out a little more. I see Interactive Media as a tool or application that contains electronic media elements (text, images, video, audio) in which a user can dictate what information is presented to them. Now we are rolling.

So to me, a basic website is Interactive Media. It has text and images and a user – by clicking links – can determine what information is presented to them. Admittedly, this is the Darwin fish crawling out of the water. It is very simple, but effective for many uses. Google is a prime example of this crawling fish. You enter in a search term, click a button and see pages of text links. I wish I had bought Google stock when it was first offered.

Let’s move up the Interactive Media evolutionary chain a bit. The next phase – we’ll call this the dog phase—is an online game. There’s a lot of interactive going and a lot of different media being displayed. Go to any kids network website (Disney, Nick, PBS Kids) and you’ll see plenty of examples.

Onward and upward, now we’re at primates just starting to stand on two feet, albeit they stumble quite often. Think of MTV Overdrive or youtube.com. These sites have video, audio, text, search capabilities, ratings, and saved preferences. They are cooking! There is something missing though. In MTV Overdrive it’s content. They hold back a lot of the actual programming because they … I guess they don’t want people to watch the shows? I don’t understand this policy. It seems to go against the pillar of network media distribution, getting people to watch your shows.

Meanwhile youtube.com will show anything. I am constantly amazed at what makes it out there. The problem with this is that 98% of the content on the site is crap. So unless you have a direct link to the video you want to watch, you’re going to see a lot of “Aunt Gladys gives the boys a scarf videos” videos.

So what’s the upright primate version of Interactive Media? I guess I’ve already used the “I’m not sure” answer, so I can’t use it again. I will say this, though. It’s not here yet.

We are still waiting on a few things. First we need convergence. As long as people have to sit at a desk to use the computer, the mass numbers will never be there. An, no, WebTV is not the answer. I am waiting for a company to come up with an interface and an input device – my bet right now is on Apple – that will let people sit on their couch and watch the internet. You want to go to Amazon, you go to Amazon. You want to watch ESPN, you watch ESPN. You want to check your stocks, you get the point. Everything has to be accessible by sitting your fanny on the couch and using this input device – and you thought this nation was fat already.

The second piece to this puzzle is the reliable aggregator. How do like those big words. There’s too much crap out there with 500 channels. Imagine the possibilities with 100,000 channels (websites). We need a site that has links to the media we want to see. Furthermore, I think this is a job only the human element can do. Yahoo Music and Netflix try to recommend content based on what you tell them you like. I may be too eclectic (fancy synonym for weird), but that never works for me –think of Queensryche being followed by Louis Armstrong. I need a place where I can be reasonably confident that their links will lead to content I want to watch. This will be the network of the future except you will tell them what you want to watch, not the other way around.

Finally we need capacity. Once people can buy an HDTV/PC’s for 500 bucks and get it hooked up to a broadband feed for $50 a month, watch out. The funny thing is that this is the component that I am most certain will happen. We will truly have arrived. Staring our electronic evolutionary equivalent in the eye – more likely we’ll be sitting down – we will be able to see, hear, read, or buy what we want, when we want. We will experience true Interactive Media.