What's the secret connection between Snapple and WebTV? Who knows? Who cares! Nonsensical cross-promotion is a privilege reserved for brand giants, and if McDonald's can stuff Babe dolls in their Happy Meals with nary a squeal of protest, conceptual plausibility is obviously a mere footnote to the big picture. But the WebTV logo on our Snapple bottlecaps may not be as backwashed as you might think - at bare minimum, it's a reminder that in executive land, the dream of dumbing the terminal or de-idioting the tube is still alive.
The big news for your favorite dubious consumer-electronics device isn't its sale to Microsoft and the concomitant spigot of capital that implies. Nor is it the announcement of a Windows CE retrofit or of Comcast-enhanced bandwidth upgrades in the future. Instead, the most surprising yelp to emerge from this shaggy-box story are the reports of the success of Philips/Magnavox's WebTV infomercial, now playing to shiftless insomniacs across the United States. The Infomercial 97 Sourcebook, which shipped with the most recent issue of AdWeek, leads off with an editorial describing the program as the most successful infomercial Philips/Magnavox has ever run. "They are actually turning a substantial profit off television," publisher Steve Dworman writes. "Early reports suggest that for every dollar they're spending on media, they're receiving an average of $3.50 in return."
What's less surprising? That a soft-lit walkthrough of the "library of your imagination" would flourish, given the necessary breadth of a half-hour hard sell? Or that disaster-hungry pundits would have long ago written off the notion that Joe Analog could care less? Most people weren't prepared for the mundane, slightly nonintuitive consequences of WebTV on display at the Good Guys: Salesmen didn't sell many units, but they quickly put it to good use as a Web proof-of-concept device - pulling interested shoppers slowly but surely to the computer section, where they might better pitch the real thing.
But even while the salesmen prove themselves adept at the timeless trick of selling up, nobody's yet revealed the perfect plan for selling the world on the "graphical multimedia portion of the Internet." In the meantime, bottlecaps are as good a reminder as any to toast those who try.
This article also appears in Net Surf, which takes the pulse of the Web.
