Screens as Interactive Commerce Surfaces

“At ABC, Paramount, and Fox, I had known what could be done with video screens: we told stories on them. But when I went to QVC in that eventful year of 1992, I watched a screen do something I’d never realized it could do. It wasn’t just a passive one-way delivery system of content. At QVC I witnessed the primitive convergence of telephones and televisions and computers all working together. They were interactive. There was a little video monitor on the set that showed the number of calls coming in when a product was offered for sale. The vertical lines representing the calls rose during the period of the sales pitch, and then, when it ended, they subsided. I was thunderstruck. To me, those calls were like watching waves coming to shore. I thought, *Screens don’t have to be just for narrative, for telling stories. Screens can interact with consumers—*that was the epiphany. It was clunky and rudimentary and I had no clear idea how to turn that revelation into action, but it sat there for a while warming up on the back plate of my brain.”

“Until, that is, one momentous day when Diane told me about a television shopping channel called QVC, the acronym for Quality Value Convenience. It sold all sorts of merchandise directly to viewers. I’d never heard of it before. She said since I was stuck in this limbo, I ought to go to the wilds of Pennsylvania, where it was located, to see the operation and report back if it would be worthwhile for her to sell her clothes on the channel. It is no understatement to say that trip gave me one of the purest and most powerful epiphanies of my life. I didn’t know it then, but it would turn out to be my way forward.”