Media Forum: Has interactive TV grown up?

What do Zip TV's troubles mean to the emerging market, Alasdair Reid asks.

You could argue that Zip TV was the product of a particularly exotic time and place in advertising history - a transitory period in digital television where pioneering new technologies had seemingly called into question the industry's conventional structures.

Zip, which was placed in administration last week, was (and may continue to be, should it find a buyer as a going concern) an interactive TV specialist but it was not really a marketing communications agency as such, more a hybrid sort of organisation that acted a little bit like a media owner and a little bit like a technology consultancy.

It basically allowed advertisers running interactive spots on the Sky Digital platform (including, as it happens, channels sold by Sky Media) to run the back-of-screen technology through servers that were not owned by Sky.

It also (and this is the way in which it acted a bit like a media owner) set up a channel of its own on the Sky platform, which basically acted as a portal for its partner advertisers.

If it sounds complicated, that is because it was. Confusingly so, its critics said. And for Zip, the breaking point was its failure to sign a deal that would have allowed its clients and consortium members to run Zip-managed interactive ads on ITV's digital satellite broadcast stream.

What sort of signal does this send about the future of this sector? Is it a worrying development? Not necessarily, Oliver Cleaver, the European media director of Kimberly-Clark, says. He states: 'We tried (interactive television advertising) last year with Pull-Ups and we had a far better response than we had in print or online. So we'll be using it again this year at perhaps three times the level. We have a view that brands like ours need to be more collaborative in terms of their relationship with consumers. Clearly there are lots of things we are still learning and maybe it's true that agencies need to do more in the way of telling us how to do this properly. Obviously there will be a lot of things people try that in hindsight will not be regarded as brilliant. It does take a bit of time. It's perhaps true that unless they are pushed in a new direction, advertisers tend to default to the comfort zone and what they know best. But I think interactive advertising will be worth the effort on our part and on the part of agencies too.'