Why can’t the web be more like television?

This is in the "They Still Don't Get It?!" category: starting today , a company called Unicast will be displaying full-motion full-screen full-audio TV commercials on web browsers when the user leaves certain sites. According to the New York Times article, you will be happily browsing a participating site (say, MSN, or iVillage). When you leave the site, a 30-second TV commercial starts playing in your browser window. You have the option of clicking past the commercial, but if you do nothing, you get the whole shebang, audio and all.

This is just a continuation of a conceptual struggle which has dogged the Web since the first banner ad appeared back in the mid-90's. Big advertisers and media companies have always wanted to view the Internet as just like Cable TV with five million channels instead of five hundred, but with worse-quality video. I won't go into all the reasons why this is wrongheaded, but it should be obvious to anyone who spends much time on the Web that this isn't the case.

The desire among the big, existing players to view the Internet as an extension of the boob-tube is understandable. TV is a known medium. They understand how it works, what the dynamic between viewer, programmer, and advertiser is. They've been profitable by exploiting this dynamic, to the benefit of most. So, if the Web is just like TV (but with poor-quality video), then all the knowledge and experience gained through decades of working with the television medium is transferrable, and they can make money in the same way. Nice, safe, neat.

On the other hand, if the Web is fundamentally different, if the dynamic between surfer, content provider, and advertiser isn't the same as with TV, then the big companies are on new ground. They have to learn new rules, and the entrenched players from the world of TV have no inherent advantage (maybe even a disadvantage, because they have to unlearn the old rules).

Because of this intense desire to apply the old rules to a new medium, we continue to get weird abominations like a web site which tries to force surfers to watch a 30-second TV commercial. Ignoring the technical hurdles (which are considerable), you're still left with the fundamental question of why anyone with any Internet savvy at all thinks this is a good thing.

The amazing thing is that the companies still haven't learned their lessons. I would have thought that after the death of dozens of companies trying to make a TV-like Web experience (or a Web-like TV experience), after the utter failure of any TV-like business model to catch fire online, companies would have figured out that they need to abandon the TV metaphor. It just doesn't work. Surfing the web is a much more interactive, user-driven experience than watching TV, and that's a large part of its appeal.

I am reminded of the bad-old-days of television, when broadcasters wanted TV to be Just Like Radio, because they understood radio, and knew how to make it work as a business. As a result, early TV broadcasts were filled with things like voice talent standing around a microphone doing radio dramas. It took a while to figure out that TV was a fundamentally different medium than radio, and required a different kind of programming.

In any medium, the key is to play to the strengths of the medium to minimize its weakness. The strength of TV is moving images and strong visuals. The weakness of the Web is video. So why waste effort in trying to overcome weakness, rather than playing to strength?

The strength of the Web is that it is user-driven, interactive, and personalized. The companies which figure out how to play to these strengths will be the winners. For example, Google, by selling small text-based context-sensitive ads, seems to be on the right track.

I am completely baffled as to why Pepsi would be spending money running TV ads on a web page, yet doesn't even advertise on the keyword "Pepsi" on Google . The Google ad is both (probably) cheaper than the video ad, and appears at a time when someone is presumably interested in Pepsi products. If I was hired as a consultant by Pepsi for $10,000/day, my advice would be to skip the video ad, and buy the words "Pepsi," "Coke," and "Cola" on Google. The ad would link to a coupon for Pepsi products in exchange for the surfer's E-mail address.

In the meanwhile, companies which try to make the Web more like TV only succeed in advertising their own cluelessness.