Lester Wunderman.
Wait, who? You mean not Tim Berners-Lee? Not William Gibson? Not DARPA?
If the name Lester Wunderman seems unfamiliar to you, you probably know his best-known creation if you ever owned a record player:
Grand Funk Railroad. Cool.
Yes, one of the founding fathers of direct marketing also invented interactivity way back in the mid-1960s.
OK, Wunderman really invented what direct marketers call an "involvement device." Simply put, asking consumers to take an additional, essentially meaningless step, actually increased the response to the ads for Columbia House. That is, an ad that asked consumers to tape a penny to the reply form actually got more new subscribers than a similar ad without the penny request.
I could go on to discuss why this phenomenon works (sometimes, at any rate). However, I think we should discuss instead whether the involvement device has an analog in the digital world.
