Marketing Wonders: Interactive TV Shows

With the YouTube age upon us streaming video has never been so convenient. TV is loosing it grip on society as more people are turning to the internet to watch their favorite shows, whenever they want. They can do so much more on computers then with a TV blaring in the background. What makes computer so much better then TV’s? Well, besides the obvious feature discrepancies the answer is simple; interactive media. TV’s allow you to zone out of reality and let it do all the work. Computers require you to interact with many different forms of media. Why am I telling you all this? Well, because someone FINALLY got the idea to merge these concepts. That’s right TV shows on the internet are nothing new, but the implementation of interactive TV shows ARE new. I am talking about Lonleygirl15. Some of you may have heard of it, most of you have not. Now don’t go thinking this is a dating website or anything, its not. This is a first of its kind media channel. The delivery of this concept is simple. The YouTube phenomenon has brought about a desire for people to move from text to “Video Blogging”.

The idea behind this show is the characters to use a design formatted after video blogging to tell a story. The storylines of this particular TV show is extremely interesting, but even if it was not, it would not matter. The shows actors pretend to be a normal person, which are people who aren’t TV characters (if that makes any sense). These are normal people who, video blog about their lives, which turn out to be unnecessarily complex. This allows the characters to interact with the audience. This is what is making this form of media so powerful in today’s overcrowded media race.

The show typically presents codes which require “cracking”. The characters typically enlist the help of viewers on the message boards, to crack the codes which then progress the storyline. The concept itself is quite spectacular when you think that the viewers are the ones dictating the progress of the actors. Furthermore the actors have MySpace pages, but not as themselves rather as their characters. This is overly confusing in one sense because we have now developed a hierarchy of fictional and non fictional people. This hierarchy goes something like this: TV & Movie Characters –> Interactive Media Characters –> “Real People”.

The TV and Movie show characters never break the third wall (there is the odd occasion). The interactive media characters ONLY break the third wall. Finally, the real people…..well they have no walls….because we are real. The show itself is a brilliant marketing idea, and definitely worth checking out.

LG15 Site: http://www.lg15.com/?p=258&play=1

LG15 MySpace: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=77542571