Good Things Really Do Come in Threes

Cable World,  April 14, 2003  

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The yellow area at the core is the Metro system, which is, according to Connors, "very urban, very Atlanta and very built out." Metro "skews younger, and has been an historical challenge from the growth side."

For Michael Hewitt, the challenge is with density and a constantly moving population. Metro is home to Emory University, Georgia Tech, Spelman College and other academic institutions with transient populations and a lot of multiple dwelling units. According to Scarborough Research, Metro residents are more likely to rent and are far more likely to be single than in other systems. Metro also has the most intense concentration of African-Americans and a substantial Hispanic community.

"The economic skew is dramatic while the demographic skew seems to change daily," says Connors. "What has been the constant there for five years is it has been the most diverse part of our market."

To reach out to Hispanics, customer care is offered in Spanish, and a Hispanic-oriented tier is in the works. Spanish-language programming is also likely when Comcast translates its Philadelphia VOD platform to Atlanta. (AT&T launched VOD, but Connors plans to relaunch with the more robust product and a bigger full-market splash.)

The split into three systems is believed to allow Connors' team the flexibility to reach smaller pockets of consumers with tailored promotions. "There's a nimbleness that we can go into a Buckhead with an offer in an MDU or into north DeKalb with a different offer that's more Hispanic," says Metro's Hewitt. "As a market with 1.3 million homes you couldn't be that nimble. We can be very grass roots, very on the ground, actually in the lobbies of MDUs and selling as customers come through the doors."

"It's really returning to basic blocking and tackling," explains Gene Shatlock, charged with marketing the Comcast brand. "You bring an umbrella approach to the entire market when you use mass media - radio, television and newspaper - then draw it down to the blocking and tackling in each of these systems. If you look at each of these systems what they're doing from a marketing perspective is very different, and they're using that approach to hit these target groups."

The approach is based on viewing the market as 10,000-to-15,000-person clusters. "They really get surgical," says Connor. "It really allows an almost neighborhood-by-neighborhood assault."

Connors says AT&T lost the marketing battle in a classic attempt "to have a common marketing message out there with the hope that that message would hit home with the number of homes you needed to respond." To make matters worse, "in order to get a message out there that had some type of chance it had to be very bland, generic because there was such a high sensitivity about what if it gets to a percentage of the market that's not rebuilt yet."

The aggressive marketwide campaign that launched Nov. 20, the day after the merger, has two distinct targets: DBS owners and potential customers without multichannel service. The overarching aim is to wrest the discussion away from the DBS providers and take control of the message. The amount of marketing dollars has been upped to the Comcast standard of $40-plus per subscriber compared to the $10-to-$15 range for AT&T.