If you're old enough to have enjoyed the original Saturday Night Live, you probably remember their wonderful fake commercials. This was one of my favorites -- and it's an example that I still use to point out to a client when they are proposing to try for two mutually exclusive markets with the same product and positioning.

That was a spoof, but it really does happen that a product will be positioned and advertised to try to reach two different markets, and that very effort means that neither will work. About thirty years ago when I was writing ad copy for a department store, I was sent an item described by the buyer as a "cake breaker, or Afro comb." The buyer refused to spring for additional space so that we could run a "cake breaker" ad in the housewares section and the "Afro comb" in the personal care department, so sure enough, that's the way it ran.

Not a single one sold, even though the item had been selling well up to that point from an unlabeled bin. Apparently, the people who had been buying cake breakers suddenly had the vision of curly black hairs in their cakes, while the people who had been buying Afro combs had the vision of sticky cake crumbs in their hair. They were mutually exclusive positions, and each was a good one. But trying to do them together killed the product.

One of the things I see when I look at the Internet TV and "enhanced TV" products like AOLTV, WebTV, and Ultimate TV is some rather confused positioning that obviously do different things for different markets.

Don't mistake me -- I believe in the viability of the Internet on TV market, and I believe in the eventual success of the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) market, too. (I have yet to be convinced about "enhanced TV," and I think that one's got quite a number of years to go before it's anything more than an experiment and a money sink.) But I'm confused about the marketing and positioning, and I wonder if the target markets won't be, too.

New product categories go through known "adopter" phases as they come onto the scene. The first buyers are a group sometimes called the "technology innovators" -- the people who have to have every latest, trickiest new technology gadget. It's a very small, typically upscale male market. Then come the "early adopters" in stages -- "early-early," "mid-early" and so on. The difference between these and the technology innovators is that, even though they are willing to be early buyers of a new product category, they've got to recognize a useful application for their lives, and believe that the category will be successful.

After the product category has been successful in all of the early adopter stages (including the "late-earlies'), it then may cross to the mainstream consumer. For a consumer product, that cross into the mainstream is what everyone hopes for, because that means it's really here to stay. It took the microwave oven almost 20 years to get there, and it took VCR between eight and ten. When the Compact Disc was introduced, it became the fastest-selling new product category to that point, but it still took five or six years to become a mainstream delivery system for recorded music.

One of the things that so surprised me when I began to meet people on WebTV, over four years ago, is that they didn't look like early adopters -- they were mainstream consumers! Then I realized that the product category was the Internet itself, not the Internet appliance, and that it had now come through its early adopter phase. The Internet appliance was able to start taking it mainstream, to people who wanted it but didn't want the hassle of dealing with a computer to get it. In fact, the early adopters were the ones who wouldn't think of buying an Internet appliance -- and why should they? They all had computers!

The PVR is just into the early-adopter market. I do think it will be a winner. I have become addicted to my Replay, and if it died now, I'd want go right out and get another PVR. It took a bit of time to get used to, but now that I'm accustomed to having all of the shows I want to watch waiting for me, along with the ability to zip through ads and boring parts, I've decided it truly is "Better TV."

But it's got a while to go before a lot of people understand the value, and even longer before it becomes something that everyone wants. After eighteen months on the market, only about 350,000 PVRs have been sold.

I can't see that Ultimate TV is anything other than another PVR. While it does have two tuners (and only a PVR user would probably understand why that's important), it only works with DirecTV and doesn't work with cable. That means I won't be buying one, because I'm not interested in dropping my cable modem and having to put up an antenna for local channels.

Is there a market for Ultimate TV beyond the DirecTV subscribers today (who already have a satellite tuner) and the new subscribers that DirecTV may pull in (in fact, why is Microsoft selling this anyway, rather than DirecTV)? EchoStar doesn't look like a prospective partner after the DishPlayer experience -- if they were, I'd think that Microsoft would have made its deal with Dish Network, rather than with DirecTV who already has announced a deal with AOLTV and TiVo to do a box with them, too.

Cable subscribers are a much bigger market, but cable tuners are turf that belongs to Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta, and they provide the matching head-ends that are already installed. It's been promised that "real soon now," you'll be able to go to the consumer electronics store and buy your own cable box, so maybe that's what they're planning for. But it's been "real soon now" for a long time and, meanwhile, their cable competitors (including the feared Time-Warner-AOL combination) are already working on two-tuner boxes with PVRs. My Replay works with my cable, but two-channel tuning either means two cable boxes, or that it would be the cable box -- therefore, a deal with the cable company would be necessary.

But wait -- what about the Ultimate TV (aka WebTV) service? Well, this was where the "floor wax/dessert topping" reference came from. Here you've got an early-adopter product that you're going to try to add value to by offering to include a mainstream product, Internet on TV, that early-adopters largely disdain as something for Luddites. Adding Internet on TV service doesn't add value, unless the customers who buy it perceive it as valuable. It does add the ability to see enhanced TV broadcasts, but that hasn't even reached the early-adopter phase yet.

Or look at it the other way. You've got a mainstream product in WebTV. But you're going to confuse and anger the users by not coming out with any new products except hardware that's several times what they've paid in the past, and has features that they don't understand or want (not to mention restricting it to satellite). Sure, Ultimate TV isn't positioned for the WebTV market. But do they think that WebTV users don't notice when they get an email from the head of WebTV Customer Service that's signed "Ultimate Service, Ultimate TV"?

Working at cross-purposes as these two market positions seem, Microsoft has the saving grace that their looming competition, AOLTV, doesn't seemed to be positioned at a market that exists at all. I've spent the last several days thoroughly exploring the AOLTV service and all I can say is that it seems to have been put together by someone who has never come in contact with a consumer.

At this point, AOLTV is totally geared around watching TV. Their service standards for content that is within or linked from their service require that a PiP (Picture in Picture) be on every screen, with a minimum size of 255 x 188 -- in other words, at least 25% of the screen. Then there's the space that's required for the navigation and of course the advertising, and what very little is left is for the content... one short paragraph's worth per page.

"AOLTV is meant to extend the TV viewing experience," say their developer guidelines, and "Viewers will only exert a minimal amount of effort when dealing with this new content."

But for someone who is primarily interested in watching television, what does it add to have this clutter around a television picture, especially since it seems to be mostly limited to dumbed-down one-paragraph factoids. To make it worse for the TV viewer, the channel guide puts the channels in categories of its choosing, not yours, and only lets you select channels within the category you've selected first. You have to break a habit you've had all your life, being able to go up and down through all of the channels, so that you can watch TV the way AOL thinks is better. Where's the benefit that would make a TV viewer say "I've got to have this"?

What about people who want to use the Internet on TV? Well, if you want to do email, you are forced to watch TV while you do it, with the TV and navigation taking up the top half of the screen and your email squeezed into a scrolling display at the bottom that only shows you three lines at a time. I searched for "Games" (which is normally an AOL keyword) and got the standard AOL Internet search results; there are no games in the AOLTV service, and none of the games links in the search worked on the AOLTV system. I saw a lot of gray screens with "page too big" or "this doesn't work on AOLTV" messages (paraphrased) as I tried to surf to various pages, including some of our own on Net4TV. As an experienced Internet user, I knew enough to try again and usually got through (at least to our stuff). But if I hadn't been an experienced user, I probably wouldn't have ever found the Internet at all. As long as there's WebTV or an Internet on TV system available on the market, I can't see anything that would make someone looking for the Internet on TV say "I've got to have this!" about AOLTV.

After this experience, it really left me wondering who AOL believes their target market is for AOLTV. Positioning is all about selecting a target group of potential buyers, identifying their wants or needs that your product could fulfill (and that would make them want to buy if they were convinced that it did), and then adjusting your marketing communication to try to convince them that it does indeed fill those needs. Is there anyone out there who wants their viewing experience "extended" to something like this for an extra $249 and $24.95 a month? Maybe they're planning to add TiVo to their dialup units, rather than just the ones they'll do with DirecTV, but that won't help with the product they've already got that doesn't have it.

Coming as it is from AOL, I'm really surprised. No one has done better at creating a "walled garden" than AOL -- full of rich content that makes people want to stay there, with the easy access to everything on the Net (and a good search engine) so that it has the open gate that makes it a garden, rather than a jail. Most importantly, people stay on AOL because their friends are there -- there are lots of ways to participate with chat, bulletin boards on tons of topics, and personal home pages. All of this is related to the way human beings behave. It seems like AOL believes that human beings turn into some different sort of creature when they look at a TV screen, and I don't think those different sorts of creatures exist, much less make up a viable market.

All of these products have potentially successful market positions, although I think AOL will need to reconsider their service design and approach before they find theirs. Fortunately, since what's wrong with it can be fixed without changing the physical product that someone takes home, they could suddenly wake up to what people really want and get it right. Until then, they also remind me of a Saturday Night Live commercial spoof from the old days -- Jane Curtin's classic ad for the feminine something product when you couldn't mention what it really did on TV: "AOLTV is for people that want ... well ... you know."

Not all products that are initially mis-positioned turn out to be losers in the long run, although they don't start to win until they get it right. When Phillips launched the Compact Disc, it positioned it as an audiophile product with an all-Classical catalog. CD doesn't have the fidelity of a pristine vinyl recording played on very high-end equipment, and audiophiles hated it. When Panasonic cut the price to consumer levels and bundled it with "Thriller," we found out who CDs were REALLY for -- all us folks who didn't take care of our records, and could now crank it up without those annoying hisses and pops. All the other companies realized they were right, and the rest is history.

Here's hoping that someone will get it right soon. There are still 50 million people out there to be turned on to the Internet on TV when they do.

For further entertainment, you may enjoy Dexter's three-part review of AOLTV:
First Look at AOLTV
REVIEW: AOLTV, Part II
Smackdown: WebTV vs AOLTV