NEW MEDIA: SPOTLIGHT ON INTERACTIVE TV - Second wave of interactive TV threatens to bypass agencies.(Brief Article)

Ad agencies cannot ignore the demand for interactive TV ads, Alasdair Reid says.

If the digital wing of the commercial television business went to the Edinburgh Television Festival hell bent on ambushing the advertising industry, they reckoned without Jim Marshall. Facing a grand indictment that media specialists are innately conservative, to the detriment of all things digital, Marshall completely turned the tables by using a fiendish and thoroughly reprehensible tactic. He admitted that they might have a point there.

It's been a funny old year in digital television. On the one hand, the enhanced TV picture has never been brighter. With Big Brother, the World Cup, Wimbledon and the Commonwealth Games, programme producers have succeeded in proving the point that event TV can be more fun when it's done on a split-screen basis with interactive sidebars and pop-up boxes.

On the other hand, advertisers and agencies haven't exactly been falling over themselves to prove something similar on the advertising side of things. A couple of years back it seemed as if a whole host of big advertisers were about to make major moves in interactive TV. Procter & Gamble and Unilever were beginning to populate the interactive microsite domains of the cable and Sky Digital platforms.

Some advertisers were even experimenting with ads in the main broadcasting stream that had interactive icons allowing you to click through to microsites.

The microsite strategy was largely allied to advertisers' website strategies and when they began to realise brand-specific websites do not really work, their disappointment spilled over into the interactive TV domain too.

OK, so quite a few people got stung - but eventually life goes on, doesn't it? Media owners with a stake in the digital future certainly think so.