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After many false dawns, interactive television is on the verge of making its mark in the big bad world of commercial reality.

But the business model for reaching consumers and providing an effective call to action is still being defined.

Fred Fields is operations director at Organic, the US-owned agency that launched in the UK this May, and he believes the interactive TV agenda is currently far too technology-focused, to the detriment of the majority of advertisers and end consumers.

"The barrier to entrance is high and God only knows when a cross-platform standard will be available," says Fields. "User expectations are being ignored in favour of the different proprietary systems. Consumers are pretty savvy and will only use something if it is genuinely useful and user-friendly for them.

"We're asking the so-called 'couch potato' to do something, and if they're not sure adequate customer service is at the other end of the line, they won't do it again."

Fields believes the call to action must be strong enough to get the couch potato out of a horizontal position and ready to order goods, book a test drive, or buy an insurance policy.

"After all, do I want to fumble around with a remote control to order a pizza via the TV when I can just pick up the phone? If you disappoint first time, why should the consumer bother?"

The nature of market tests so far is that platform owners are working in a collaborative way with a chosen set of advertisers. "They incubate a set of advertisers and give them preferential treatment in the short term, but in the long term the business model can't support such exclusivity," says Fields.

However, he does believe that the early adopters will have first mover advantages, because the businesses that have effectively been locked out of the interactive TV loop thus far will have trouble catching up later on.

"A vision of nirvana has been driving people towards the medium," he says. "It will consolidate the chain of events involved in leading up to an action, by giving the user one device for actions that would previously have taken three or four."

Currently, nobody is coming clean on the real statistics behind the interactive TV trials that have been taking place.

"Numbers are not forthcoming for the amount of transactions being conducted.

Nobody really knows who the key players are and who will succeed," says Fields. "It's not an easy call for an advertiser used to placing a 30 second slot with Channel 4."

Interactive TV represents a whole new coupling of media planning and functionality that is, in effect, a new way of advertising.

"We need to understand the new model before analysing it in terms of concrete statistics. How do you sell advertising in a free-floating experience?" Fields says.

Measuring behaviour is much easier than assessing the effect on a consumer's perception, because interactive response can be measured in terms of the number of orders placed, responses received and services applied for.

While some advertisers and content owners adopt a watching brief, Fields thinks they should be more proactive, especially in key vertical markets such as travel, automotive and finance.

"These sectors are tailor-made for interactive content and many of them are dipping a toe in the water," says Fields. "At the very least companies that are experimenting will get some positive PR and will be perceived as forward-looking and innovative."