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AOL’s In2TV Peels Couch Potatoes Away from the Tube

Written on
Apr 21, 2006 
Author
Kiran Aditham  |
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AOL’s In2TV Peels Couch Potatoes Away from the Tube

Having announced in March that it’s throwing its hat in the TV 2.0 ring with In2TV, its own broadband television network, AOL is now finally set to promote it. But rather than indulge the normal media buys on Yahoos, Googles, and niche sites to promote it, the company is exhuming one of the classic archetypes of TV viewing—the couch potato—to lure viewers to In2TV and its extensive, full-length, FREE library of classic 70s and 80s TV series.

“Everyone knows the reference to a couch potato. It’s a very simple, iconic type of reference to television, and that was our thinking behind it creatively as to why we put the potato in the campaign, AOL’s VP of Audience Marketing Stephanie Dolgins tells ADOTAS. “What we’re really doing is modernizing and taking the potato into a new era, so to speak, where everyone can relate to the image and see what the potato means.”

The animated potato–whose laptop is permanently attached to the hip to show consumers a whole new way to revisit nostalgia and watch classic TV—will be rendered offline via outdoor displays including New York’s Reuters billboard in Times Square (below) as well as on LA’s Sunset Strip.

But the online portion of the campaign is divided into two components, according to AOL. Beginning May 4th, the company is launching the “In2TV Watch to Win Game”, an interactive trivia video game that will invite consumers to watch a clip from a show, then answer a trivia question. With each play, the animated potato will walk across the screen and hold up a laptop where the video and questions will appear. “It might be something like ‘which character in this show went on to dance with Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction,’ Dolgins explains. “It takes the references of the [classic] TV shows, and adds a modern twist to it. You can click on an image, guess the right person and enter to instantly win prizes. It’s allowing people to sample the shows and see what we have to offer in a fun, unique way.”

Among the goodies up for grabs with this 30-day game, which will go live on the In2TV site, are instant cash prizes, digital home entertainment systems with Intel Viiv technology, as well as WinBook T230 laptops with Intel Centrino Duo chips in tow. But since the trivia game has a brief shelf-life, AOL is not only promoting the In2TV site on its network of sites—i.e. Moviefone, Netscape—but is utilizing search marketing efforts (keyword buys), and more significantly, a viral campaign also set to launch sometime in May.

“It will target fan sites as well as a bunch of other areas on the Web,” Dolgins says. “That will be going out in May as well to really engage folks on a show-to-show basis where we know we have fans of shows like Welcome Back, Kotter, Wonder Woman, etc.—it will really reach out to those audiences.”

Besides the aforementioned shows, AOL mined the Warner Bros. vaults (appropriately enough, since it’s a Time Warner company) to revive other TV faves including Growing Pains, Alice and Lois & Clark. For AOL and Warner Bros, In2TV provides the opportunity to step into the digital, high-speed era of entertainment.

“We came together with Warner Brothers, and it was really a win-win for both of us in that we were creating this entirely new platform for the distribution of television content,” says AOL Corporate Communications spokeswoman Jennifer Rankin. “This is really just the first step in that direction. The time is right, and the whole area right now is really exploding.” Dolgins adds, “In2TV is right now the largest collection of free full-length television programming on the web, with hundreds of episodes, of programs, which we’re updating currently on a monthly basis with whole new slots of shows for folks to watch.”

Beyond the programming itself, AOL has also added several trimmings to keep viewers occupied on the In2TV site, including a “TV Karaoke” section and “Star Play”, which pulls some skeletons out of the closet by revealing old TV appearances of some of today’s biggest stars (Brad Pitt in Growing Pains, Jay Leno in Alice).

“There are also a lot of things promotionally we’re doing now, like “did you know this about certain actors actresses” or “where are they now”, so you can really follow some of these folks through their career,” Dolgins says. “So there’s a bunch of fun pieces, and obviously the programming itself. It’s a whole new way to really engage with these television shows, find them again, and introduce them to new audiences.”

Take your place on the couch, and revisit (or visit) some classic television near and dear to our hearts at aol.com/in2tv.





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