HOLLYWOOD -- No doubt about it, Sony's Columbia TriStar Interactive general manager Lynda Keeler provided the best sound bite during Thursday's high-octane panel discussion on the future of television sponsored by the National Association of Television Program Executives at the American Film Institute.
Surrounded by startups taking pot shots at Hollywood's glacier-like movement toward interactive digital entertainment, Keeler brought the house down when she intoned: "Do not underestimate the power of Sony!"
Replied Digital Entertainment Network's David Neuman, "I feel the chill."
Jokes aside, those comments defined the questions raised by arguably Hollywood's best panel in months on the future of programming on TV and the Net.
How fast will Hollywood's old guard realize that old paradigms of creating and distributing content are about to be smashed by technology and the Internet? For that matter, how fast will Silicon Valley realize that it can't survive without Hollywood and Madison Avenue's old-fashioned storytelling and brands?
For this panel, the answers were clearly "right now" and "right now."
Keeler wasn't just making cute statements. Sony is moving rapidly toward interactive television with its production of interactive Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune for WebTV. And don't forget its investment in startups like TiVO (paused programming in real time) and Mixed Signals (inserting computer code into the NTSE signal).
Columbia TriStar has also revamped its Dawson's Creek Web site to include "Dawson's Desktop" (create a customized computer desktop, Dawson's-style) or buy stuff related to the show ("You saw Dawson give his necklace to Joey, now own the exclusive replica!").
Neuman, a former Disney exec, is well aware of the power of traditional branding. DEN's sponsors and advertisers include names such as Dell and Pennzoil.
His beef is with the way traditional TV restricts those brands to linear spots that only passively engage an audience. Even Web banner ads are becoming "the wallpaper of the medium," Neuman said.
The audience needs to be hooked by compelling interactive advertisements woven seamlessly into the fabric of Internet programming -- the prototypical jeans a user can click to buy. Many advertisers will also conduct traditional image campaigns -- in interactive formats tailored to the Internet -- to reach target audiences, Neuman said.
"Pennzoil isn't up there trying to get [DEN's Gen Y users] to link to the Pennzoil site," Neuman said. "They want to make sure they don't lose their standing with a new generation."
Or, as AtomFilms senior vice president of business affairs Heather Redman put it, "We're [posting] a piece of content that's viral in nature, and then letting our advertisers wrap their message around it." (AtomFilms posts independent short films on the Web.)
Even time-worn radio promotion schemes may have a new incarnation on the Web, according to Pseudo's Joshua Harris.
"We do something very similar to radio," said the chairman of a company that airs interactive video programming with titles like "Luscious" and "Spacewatch" on the Internet. "We have [announcers] shout out their thanks to Sprite. The Net is the culmination of all these mediums."
One key difference between old and new media, the panelists agreed, is the scalability of marketing campaigns. The broadcast TV model depends on advertisements reaching millions of viewers with only a tiny fraction of them buying the products.
By contrast, DEN is trying to target the messages of its advertisers to ever-smaller subsets of its viewers, Neuman said. One of DEN's youth-oriented clothing advertisers, for example, is only "interested in reaching 20 people in every high school," Neuman said.
"They own the hip-hop generation, the kids who establish what's cool and hip," Neuman said. "There are hundreds of others at their schools that they don't want to reach and they don't want to wear their clothes."
