Lost Looking for Lost (Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic)

I am a big Lost fan but am never at home when it airs and the DVR situation at my place is worthy of a separate blog post. The first season I watched all the episodes commercial-free on DVD. Last season, I downloaded all the episodes from iTunes. This season, I am trying to keep up episode-by-episode and its harder than I'd like. In fact, I got lost on iTunes and ABC.com looking for last week's episode of Lost. Here's the story.

Yesterday, I went to iTunes and searched under Lost. The search results showed all the categories where Lost content appears -- from albums to TV seasons. I clicked on TV seasons and then clicked on Lost. iTunes took me to the image you see above. The problem? I didn't want to buy a season pass, just the last episode. So, I clicked on Home and tried to find the individual episodes through the directory path and came up with the same answer. Again, I found the season pass, but not the individual episodes. Determined to find them, I went back to search. Read on to see what happened next....

After searching, I clicked on the Lost page and scrolled down. Voila! There they were...listed at the bottom of the page in the old iTunes listing style. I missed them before because they appeared as an after-thought at the bottom of the page.

You might be asking, why is this worthy of a blog post? Here's why. iTunes is a simple and seamless experience. Everyone enthuses about its revolutionary properties. But, as iTunes starts offering more content and more content types, the designers can't lose site of the importance of simple and clear navigation. As a consumer, I think iTunes should have clearly presented two simple choices: 1) the entire season; 2) each episode a la carte. But, the designers were so busy creating this beautiful pictorial image, they forgot to showcase the goods. Straight-forward design problem, no?

After complaining about this to a colleague, he said, "why didn't you just watch it on ABC.com?" Well, I wanted to "own" the episode so I could re-watch it anytime and I didn't really want a commercial message (heresy, I know). Nevertheless, I went to ABC.com to check it out. Guess what? You can get lost looking for Lost there too. How could that be? ABC hits you with a huge center-well offer that says "Watch ABC Shows Online Now." I like it. Simple and clear. So far, so good. Click on that offer and another page loads with tiles of each series. Click on the Lost tile and another page loads (its marked "Patent Pending" at the bottom) with tiles of each of the series featured. I clicked on the image of Sayeed and was given the option of watching a Lost music video or a DH music video. What? Where was last week's episode? I closed my browser in frustration. I went back again figuring I had missed something. I had. The tile to the right of Sayeed features an image of 13 of the show's characters standing on the beach. No mention of Lost. Even on a larger monitor it wasn't immediately evident that they were characters from Lost. Fortunately if you make the right guess and click on that tile, you are taken to a page offering the last four episodes. Hurray! I had finally found Lost. Finally.

We are entering a brave new world where you can watch TV content on demand, often online. Recognizing this is a new paradigm, why can't the site managers (iTunes and ABC) make it easy to find? Major content producers look with horror as YouTube grabs their viewers and wonder why its happening. Youtube offers compelling content that is smartly tagged. Here is a big idea: how about a simple guide -- TV Guide meets Yahoo -- that simply lists the series, and the available episodes with a simple "click to view" or "click to buy" button. Its probably not worthy of a patent but would certainly make it easier for viewers.

If iTunes and ABC are not getting the downloads or views they'd like, maybe they should look at the user experience. If I were being generous, I'd give both experiences a 7 out of 10 possible points. Great promise, but less than exceptional delivery.

I'd like to think I am an experienced internet user yet I got lost looking for Lost. On iTunes. And, on ABC. Go figure.

Mark Kingdon