Leaning Back with LookBack from TimeWarner

The new Look Back offering from Time Warner (see: Look Back Service Forces Consumers to Watch Ads in the New York Times) is baffling.  My prediction: DOA.

And it didn't need to be that way. 

TiVo is a fabulous example of a lean-forward device that changes media consumption.  Instead of turning on the TV and disappearing into the Barcalounger, the TiVo consumer sits with remote in hand, engaged with the experience.  They are not a vessel, they are the captain. Time Warner failed to embrace this lean-forward consumer.

Reminds me of a CEO friend of mine, who regularly complains that business would be awesome if it weren't for all the pesky customers.

The new Look Back offering is a TiVo, only you can't fast-forward over commercials and you can't store shows for more than a day.  It takes a great concept, the DVR, and removes the very features that make it great. Here, kids, have a cheap ice cream cone! Oh, yeah, no cone, and no ice cream, but the napkin is in the shape of a cone!

But it is easy to take swipes at ideas like this.  Certainly we have to understand that Neilsen is changing the way they measure media, and an unwatched commercial is now a real loss to the media property.  We need to sympathize with their need to fund the content!

Yup, we do.

But pretending we can jam the customer back into the Barcalounger where they belong won't work.

Instead, why not embrace engagement?  Have them rate the commercials with thumbs up and down.  Let them mail the shows to each other with a pre-reel ad.  Even better, open up the cable delivery networks to real innovation and let the tens of thousands of tech and design engineers that fuel Web2.0 go crazy on the ad.

Odds are someone would devise an ad unit that worked.  Or come up with a way to introduce user-selectable commercial channels, or create something unimaginably unimaginable (think Twitter) that can change the way TV works.

Almost any industry on the planet would kill to have a customer lean forward and engage with their product.  The DVR has opened the door to this engagement.  Time Warner needs to embrace their consumer, not insult them.