I was fairly surprised today to see that Five (the tv station, not the power pop combo of “Slam Dunk da Funk” fame) has announced it is ‘abandoning its interactive TV service’ making the red button an anachronistic relic of the late 90s it always deserved to be.

I remember back in the late 90s being ‘educated’ by some media experts as to how the red button was about to revolutionise the way people interacted with their set. It allowed people to take the previously one way relationship and make it a dialogue which meant deeper relationships with brands and instant responses to amazing offers.

The trouble was, it was always gash. It took an age, regularly crashed, obscured the thing you were actually interested in watching (the idea of interrupting a time specific piece of content with one which wasn’t was clearly absurd), and was full of dire content (obviously, as it cost a fortune to stream anything worth seeing, and of course the majority of people were never going to bother anyway).

The fact that we already had a faster, quicker, more reliable, cheaper (remember it always costs about a quid to connect via your sky box if you ever want to actually send anything), relevant version of this technology in the fab new world wide interweb thingy, which I’m sure most people had heard of at this time, even if they weren’t all busy being rickrolled.

I lost count of the number of times I heard it recommended as a great idea, but can guarantee that any positive steps were closely caveated with something along the lines of “Of course you’ll have to have a free offer or a competition to get anyone to ever press the button”. Which obviously premiumised the experience for anyone stupid enough to press the button, and also made them think about the brand rather than the free holiday to Pontins they were trying to win.

Anyway, always keen to explore new marketing executions, I did used to press red every now and again, so must take this opportunity to thank Coors for my pint glass which I’m still using to the day, thank Disney for my promotional video, which I’ve never watched but the curmudgeon in me wanted to make them waste money fulfilling the deal for no lead as I hated the ad so much, and Honda for the gym bag which smelled of rubber, which is now full of odd socks in the laundry room.

Did I ever purchase anything, think better of a brand, find any desperately exciting new information or win anything though? What do you think….

Tags: 5ive, Coors, Disney, Five, Honda, interactive, red button, rickrolling, TV