Media: Perspective - Zip TV won't make a silk purse out of interactive TV ads.

It's usually easy to spot a turkey. England in penalty shoot-outs, Oasis at Glastonbury, Ross Kemp in soldier dramas. No confusion in my mind, they're all painfully bad.

But life isn't always as cut and dried. Take interactive TV advertising as an obvious example of where the lines between the great and the grisly can blur.

Brilliant idea - an application that can potentially immerse the viewer in extra content - but frequently marred by shoddy execution. Pushing the red Sky Digital button can result in minutes of delay before you're back watching your favourite show with little but a mailed-out car brochure as reward.

For every Volvo 'The Mystery of Dalaro' (directed by Spike Jonze), there are a dozen unimaginative executions that seem to use interactivity as a badge of innovation to mask the absence of a decent creative idea.

So it seems clear that interactive advertising has far to go. The same could be said of Zip TV, the 'virtual' TV channel supported by 11 top advertisers including Procter & Gamble, COI Communications and Unilever.

Launched in 2002 by the former OMDtvi director Andrew Howells, Zip last week finally secured funding for the roll-out of its TV channel service from the investment company Morgan Investments.

The disappointing thing about Zip is that it's not a real digital channel showing interactive advertising. It just means that if viewers of interactive ads by the 11 ...