All the same, high hopes remain for ITV going forward. "The possibilities have gotten richer in a short period of time," says David Cooperstein of Forrester Research. Nielsen recently released a report saying that Americans, who watch an average of 4.5 hours per day, are on their phone for 20% of the time they're actually in front of the TV.—the largest proportion of time for any activity in the survey. Companies and app developers are capitalizing on this trend, coming up with different ways to interact with TV for a lot less money.
Shazam, for instance, offers an app that can hear what commercial is playing and then deliver the viewer coupons, downloads, or relevant links. Procter & Gamble (PG), Honda (HMC), and American Express have tried Shazam, as well as networks like Bravo and Oxygen. IntoNow, which Yahoo (YHOO) bought last year three months after it launched, offers a similar concept. During the Pepsi Max (PEP) advertisement at this year's Super Bowl, for instance, IntoNow users were sent a coupon for a free Pepsi if they simply tagged the ad. MTV is building out its own version of Shazam and IntoNow.
That's not to say that internet firms won't get a larger piece of the estimated $150 billion U.S. ad industry, and that networks should stop creating ventures like Canoe. In a cheeky nod to the increasing competition between online video advertising and traditional television advertising, an amalgam of high-powered tech firms -- Google (GOOG), Yahoo, AOL (AOL), and Microsoft (MSFT) -- is holding an advertising conference in April to woo advertisers by presenting different marketing opportunities for companies to create online-only ads. The conference is essentially a copycat of the UpFront conference that TV network executives traditionally throw in May.
All the same, it seems that TV advertising will almost certainly retain its edge and emerge as the big winner for 2012—and with an election in Washington and the summer Olympics in London both boosting TV viewership, the prize will be considerable.
