NBC “Heroes” Promo Makes Bid for Appointment TV, Fails

29 January 2007 | Culture, Eventness, Media, TV & Movies | Comments

On my commute at around 8:15am this morning one of the local radio stations had a teaser for tonight’s new episode of the NBC series, “Heroes.” The tag line of the teaser was: “Don’t wait to watch and don’t watch alone.”

Here is NBC attempting to short circuit consumers with TiVo — and I suspect the superhero theme of the show pitches at exactly the demographic that most embraces DVRs and ad-skipping — and turn “Heroes” into appointment television laden with eventness… but they’re just TELLING the viewers that this is appointment TV. Saying, “don’t skip the ads, watch in real time with other people.”

You can’t create eventness by fiat.

Instead of ordering the readers to watch in a particular way, why doesn’t NBC create something that will give the readers an extra layer of experience if they do so? Hidden content in the show that will give you a clue to go online while watching to figure something out before the end of the show? A contest?

You have to give viewers a compelling reason to watch online.