-Understanding the Interactivity Between Television and Mobile Commerce

The evolution of mobile commerce (m-commerce) applications allows customers to be interactive [1, 6] with television shows by sending text or picture messages. This development is moving mass broadcast communications toward two-way dialogue and a real `conversation’ [3, 4]. Sony PlayStation and 20th Century Fox already use this interactive strategy, known as LOOP, which is a marketing campaign approach marketers use to build an effective process of interactivity with consumers. The LOOP uses mobile-based data transfer through Short Message Services (SMS) text, or Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) pictures and sound, to allow the user to send messages to another individual (via mobile phone) or a machine (via the Internet). One interesting aspect of this flow of information is the evolving stream of messages created by the consumer using the m-commerce medium to influence programming or advertisements in the TV and other traditional mass-communications environment. This approach leverages the cross-medium synergies to enhance customers’ experiences with interactivity. In this context, the audience is encouraged by the content information and form (such as polls, voting, or competitions) provided in a TV program or advertisement to interact by sending a message response in the form of SMS, MMS, or in the future VMS (Video Mobile Services).

In July 2004, for the first time in the U.S., TXTSTATION (www.txtstation.com) provided services to Los Angeles-based KCAL-TV for airing the Anaheim Angels and the Seattle Mariners baseball games, allowing viewers to interact directly with the presenter’s questions through their mobile phones’ messaging applications. Viewers were able to cast their votes for their most-valuable players and the pitchers they would least like to play [2]. Screening the audience responses in real time throughout the game encouraged greater viewer loyalty and trust [5, 6] and reduced the distraction of other activities. Furthermore, the viewers are in control of the interactive process and networks like KCAL-TV control the information in the LOOP to enhance interactivity [4].

A closer look at firsthand observations on how and why customers and industry participants leverage the LOOP highlights the key strategic ingredients companies should focus on in order to optimize the interactivity between the viewer, using m-commerce messaging applications, and the TV program. These descriptions of customer behavior are drawn from the experiences of 29 senior managers from Siemens Mobile (Asia) and their industry partners (network providers, content aggregators, and content providers) in 2003.

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Two-Way Communications

Different channels present the marketer with different strengths. Television attracts the greatest viewer attention and persuasion to interact in the LOOP. The radio and the Internet play an insignificant role. The radio was found to detach the customer from interacting and the Internet was overly goal directed:

"Radio does not work at all for this kind of business. If you’re operating a computer to get to a Web site, you’re more in the driving seat, and it doesn’t tell you to do something, you’re telling it to do something … quite a different attitude. So it’s not quite the same with TV, which has your whole attention. TV makes an influence."

Using TV was the best media to push information to customers and to create opportunities for interacting with willing participants in the LOOP. Targeting different groups, including teenagers and homemakers, required the deployment of different types of campaigns and applications:

"We use TV as the media to provide the information to customers … and use the mobile as a channel to interact with them. It doesn’t have to be a quiz, it could be any service that interact[s]. The viewers are not just teenagers. A lot of them were housewives who have time to spend with television."

Target markets also needed specialized TV content and applications to impact the viewer at a personal level. Creating greater intimacy may involve leveraging the users’ desire to play games:

"So another nature is like the gambling nature…but it’s not real gambling… [but rather like] some games that they are doing now on the TV."

Creating real-time interaction in this context positively impacted the viewers’ trust in the LOOP and their desire to influence the media:

"You can see people who keep sending messages to TV shows regarding soccer. They ask you the question every day, you send an answer back. If you never get anything back you give up and you will never trust this kind of game anymore."

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Active Participants in Conversation

The audience’s trust and inherent belief in the TV show provoked some viewers to try to develop dialogue in an effort to reason with the media:

"You know media, like TV; can impact a lot of things… when they’re told something it affects the thoughts of the viewers. So whenever we put a commercial on TV … a lot of people are trying to reason with that media."

Their belief in TV also contributed to framing the viewer’s mood, putting customers in a more positive frame of mind to use m-commerce messaging applications to interact:

"Not only the advertising. They receive entertainment. So they’re in a good mood when you show something and when they’re in a good mood, they positively receive it."

Audience participation in the conversation was also dependant on the information provided in the TV show. For example, loyalty to entertainment content encouraged greater involvement in the LOOP:

"We also have our own fan club who loves our content."

In some cases, viewers engaged in the LOOP’s conversation to deepen their interaction and heighten their emotional state. For instance, in soap operas, the viewer’s need to `kill’ and `purge the demon’ of the show was evoked by mood-framing strategies and encouraged the conversational interaction in the LOOP:

"A few of them are crying and want to kill the star. The drama can catch their mind."

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Real-Time Conversations

In the LOOP, service quality was strongly influenced by the simultaneous level of interactivity (real-time response rates) between the viewers and the network:

"The quality can be quality of content, it can be response time, it can be speed…"

Furthermore, this perception of quality encouraged greater use of dialogue to alter aspects of the TV show, creating the perception that TV listens and thereby completing the process of interactivity:

"We allowed the viewers, the audience, to participate with us. They can talk and they can answer questions and can get some prizes from us and that’s amazing because a lot of the audience come to participate. The mobile phone will act as a kind of circle on which to communicate."

In other cases, real-time communication in the LOOP encouraged viewers to participate in other activities such as tapping into the need to be competitive and be involved in a game:

"I think they relate to something where they can challenge others … so I would say it should be interactive." "I think in certain situations people actually prefer to use [messaging applications] because people like to play some games and wait for the response. It’s like mutual fun."

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Control of Communications

Comparatively, TV offered the marketer greater control over the nature and outcomes of interactivity by shifting the audience from passivity (voyeurism) to active participation in the TV show. The effective LOOP-oriented strategies helped to reach evasive audiences because they allowed these viewers to opt-in and opt-out. The audience’s control over the communication process also produced the unexpected behavior of the audience standing up to rationally engage with the show:

"I can give my emotions through [messages], but face-to-face with someone I can’t. Part of the reason why [messaging] has been successful. People will stand up and pick up the phone, at a premium rate and then vote for whatever reason and that’s the nature of TV. It actually gets people to do things that they wouldn’t really in their right mind rationally do."

Finally, the audience control of the communications process provided the marketer with the ability to measure and track audience responses. The data collected in the LOOP by computer servers was used as a measure of the active and interactive component of the audience.

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Leveraging the LOOP

Companies intending to develop interactive LOOPs like that employed by Sony PlayStation, are recommended to follow these key strategic ingredients:

• Television is the optimal and most pervasive medium for interactive LOOP’s.
• The audience’s propensity to interact is a function of developing the appropriate LOOP orientation campaigns and messaging applications.
• Campaign content and applications designed around impulsive play and games will increase interactivity by influencing the audience personally and intimately.
• Audience members’ participation with the TV show impacted positively on their perceptions of trust in the LOOP and enhanced the audience’s willingness to actively participate in the conversation.
• Maintaining conversations required TV shows to continually heighten the audience’s emotive state, change their attitudes, and frame their mood.
• Real-time communications was a key ingredient of the audiences’ perceptions of service quality, trust in the communication process, engagement in game playing, and enticement to interact in the LOOP.
• The LOOP gave the audience greater control over the outcomes of interactivity.
• The LOOP should shift the audience from passivity to active participation through the real-time development of the TV show by the viewer.
• The LOOP allowed previously difficult to engage audiences to be interactive because of their ability to opt-in and opt-out.
• The mutual control in the LOOP communications enabled audience interaction to be effectively measured.

Like KCAL-TV and TXTSTATION, optimizing the LOOP has had direct benefits. The LOOP is a new marketing channel and source of revenue. It also gives sponsors the opportunity to interact with customers on a one-to-one basis, while at the same time enhancing the TV programming content.

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