What's known as "participative advertising", or the red button to you and me, is apparently the future of commercial TV.
Admittedly, some of this stuff is rather good and brands like T-Mobile, Land Rover and South African Airways have dabbled in iTV with varying degrees of success.
However, iTV advertising will never be more than the old interruption model of brand communication with extra bells and whistles.
What it has going in its favour is that the viewer has the option to delve into a microsite to find out more about the product and service on offer.
The problem is that the viewer will need to be highly motivated to do just that and it's going to take a long time before this becomes second nature.
So is broadcast sponsorship a better alternative to iTV?
Well, brand owners are making sponsorship idents look less like advertising and more like programming.
For example, Budweiser is the broadcast sponsor of the Fifa World Cup Germany 2006 on ITV1 and its idents take viewers into a mock sports TV show anchored by two gibbering presenters waxing on about the game just seen (all right, it's a generic script, but actually it works!).
However, even something as good as this may fall victim to the personal video recorder that apparently will revolutionise our viewing habits.
According to the latest estimates, personal video recorders (PVR) will have penetrated over 8m households by 2010, up from 1.8m today.
And of course these devices, such as Sky+, are already here, so viewers recording the World Cup could choose to skip the humorous Budweiser ad if they wanted to.
There's no argument that PVRs will effect the way we'll watch TV. The issue is how much will it do so?
Despite the threat of millions of viewers choosing to skip past brand messages, current evidence points in the other direction.
According to the latest research published by BARB, just 10-20% of all viewing in PVR households in the UK is time-shifted and this isn't expected to change radically even accounting for the 30% increase in PVR ownership in 2010.
And research by Millward Brown for the main US TV networks showed no difference in recall and recognition between PVR owners and non-owners for TV ads broadcast during prime time.
Time shifted viewing by US viewers
When watching recorded TV programmes, how often do you skip or fast forward through the ads
Behaviour PVR owners DVD Recorder Owners (%)
All the time 37% 27%
Frequently 32% 32%
Occasionally 21% 24%
Rarely 6% 9%
Never 5% 8%
Source: Millward Brown
Potentially, this could be good news for broadcast sponsors like Budweiser as these research studies suggest that viewers who own PVRs are more likely to pay attention to TV during the ad breaks when viewing live sport, for example, and are less likely to be distracted by other activities than non-PVR owners.
However, it's not going to be all plain sailing.
The research found the likelihood of stopping to watch a specific brand message is strongly influenced by having an interest in the brand and product category in the first place.
This suggests that high-interest products and categories will have an innate advantage in a PVR world.
The challenge for broadcast sponsors is to make their messages enjoyable to watch in order to stop viewers from fast-forwarding the broadcast sponsorship idents.
And for this, they must increasingly think content.
Ardi Kolah is chief strategy officer UK at PRISM and author of the forthcoming 'Sponsorship: Strategies for Maximising the Return on Investment', published by Sport Business Group. He can be contacted on +44 (0)1483 441 008.
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