Powerpoint: TV3 is driving us Tellydotty

By PETER CALDER

An Australian politician once famously remarked that if you wanted loyalty you had best buy yourself a dog.

It's a comment that the management at TV3 should have chiselled into their desks. If they had done so, perhaps they would not have embarked upon this extraordinarily irritating promotion designed to get their viewers to stick, like small, adhesive, photo-sensitive dots, to their screens.

I've long felt a sneaking sort of sympathy for TV3. Taking on the state broadcaster and offering viewers something approaching an alternative was always going to be a daunting challenge and many times at industry functions I've listened to the channel's staffers fighting back tears of incredulity as they wonder at the apparently unbridgeable ratings gap between TV3 and TVNZ.

Even when John Hawkesby replaced Richard Long (the most unpopular assassination since John Lennon met Mark Chapman), it meant only a temporary dip in TVNZ's ratings as outraged viewers switched their allegiances.

I once suggested to one of them that bombarding 3's viewers with channel promos at every ad break might be counterproductive. (I don't mean trailers for upcoming shows but those vague and lustrous advertisements exhorting us to "turn to 3" which were on show only to people who had already done so). They muttered something about brand identity and turned elsewhere for sympathy.

This tellydot promotion, now in its third week, takes matters much further. Viewers can pick up dots from one of three participating retail chains and, when prompted like Pavlov's dogs, they must peel off the backing tape and stick one of the dots in position.

There, we are told, a special film will record whether the set has been left tuned in. Prizes are promised.

Jim Rennie, who runs the New Zealand office of the company supplying the dots and the promotion, assures me the technology works and I have no reason to doubt him.

And maybe the "integrated marketing" in which the oil company, the two fast food outlets and TV3 effectively deliver their customer bases to each other is working (but for how long: let's have a look at the ratings charts and sales graphs in six months).

What worries me is what the whole idea says about us, the viewers, and what the television channels and their marketing partners think of us.

When Rennie tells me that "the punter likes to interact with the television," I have this image of a home viewer, on hands and knees in front of the glaring tube, squinting and grunting as he or she attempts to adhere the infernal device in the right place.

The pose, worse than undignified, is astonishingly suggestive of the relationship between television channels and their audiences. This "interaction" looks suspiciously like submission, or cargo cult worship even. That we should participate so actively in our own capture would be funny if it were not so sad.

But let TV3 and all the small-screen hucksters copy this out in capitals: captives are not capable of loyalty. When your promotion, with its screechingly irritating animations, is over, we won't be one whit more loyal than when it started.

Call us old-fashioned. We'll still be wanting better programmes.