Lost amid the old-school rituals of last Saturday’s Creative Arts Emmys -- the first of the TV Academy’s two Emmy awards galas -- was a tiny signpost of change, an Emmy for “Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media,” marking the 10th year since the primetime Emmys first recognized “interactivity” as a legitimate part of the television business.
The Emmy went to ABC’s “Oscar Digital Experience,” one of several nominees that leveraged social media and second-screen apps.
By itself, the award made barely a ripple inside the hall, overshadowed as it was by dozens of other awards.
Indeed, the entire Creative Arts Awards itself is the red-headed step-child of the main Emmy event this Sunday (Sept. 18), when the Emmys are handed out by and to name-brand actors and those who hire them.
But in the real world of the media business, there’s a tsunami of disruption underway, which is why it’s so interesting to look back at a decade of interactivity.
More than the merits of one production over another, and certainly more important than the messy, sausage-making of self-congratulatory industry awards, the story of the interactive Emmy illustrates the interplay between technology, content and platforms that has taken place inside an industry which is still quite schizophrenic about the forces that are disrupting its business models and career paths.
The Interactivists
The story begins in the late '90s with a band of interactive media true-believers -- call them “interactivists” -- who seized upon the framework of the L.A.-based Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS) as a way to gain legitimacy for interactive media and the people who were trying to make it.
Some of these folks worked inside the TV business. Others wanted in. (I coined the phrase “interactivists” to describe them in this article that you can download here.)
By 2000, ATAS authorized the formation of the Interactive Media Peer Group (IMPG), one of 28 “peer groups” that comprise the organization’s byzantine and highly political governance structure.
Two years later, HBO’s “Band of Brothers” website won the Academy’s first award for interactivity. Not a statuette, but recognition nonetheless.
Ten years later, on Thursday August 25 to be exact, I was among the “Blue Ribbon Panel” that selected the 2011 Primetime Emmy winner(s) for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media that was presented Sept. 10.
The nominees (envelope please):
>> ABC's Grey's Anatomy Sync; ABC.com, Nielsen, Gravity Mobile, Shondaland
>> Conan O'Brien Presents: Team Coco; TBS.com: Team Coco Digital
>> Fringe: Division; Fox.com: Warner Bros. Television, Bad Robot Productions
>> Late Night With Jimmy Fallon; NBC.com: Gavin Purcell, Producer; Sara Schaefer, Producer; Jimmy Fallon, Producer; Robert Angelo, Producer
>> Oscar Digital Experience; ABC.com: Disney ABC Television Group; Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
One or more among these five could have won the Emmy, due to a change in the rules governing the interactive award this year.
