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South Jersey Shines In Philly's Shadow

The southern half of New Jersey is a lot like Philadelphia. Since there are no local broadcast TV stations housed in the state, the Philly affiliates hold sway in South Jersey. Philadelphia radio stations dominate as well and the Philadelphia Inquirer is the house paper at the Windrift resort in Avalon, just as it is at many hotels along the shore, from Cape May north to Ocean Beach and Atlantic City. South Jersey residents are loyal to Philadelphia's Eagles and Flyers - not New York's Giants and Rangers, or even New Jersey's own Jets or Devils, for that matter.

So it's apropos that the region is served by Comcast Cable, which of course is headquartered in Philadelphia.

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Most of the Comcast South Jersey region is actually situated in the Philadelphia demographic market area. The system stretches south from Philly to the Vineland/Pleasantville area, and extends to Bordentown Township, just south of Trenton. In total, it passes 835,000 homes and serves 620,000 basic cable subscribers. The system is an amalgam of many different acquisitions the company made near the end of a growth spurt that saw its subscribers jump to 7.5 million at the end of 2000 from 4.2 million in 1996.

In January of 2000, Comcast paid $6 billion in stock to acquire 1.1 million subscribers in the Philadelphia area from Lenfest Communications. Two big system swaps around the same time beefed up subscriber rolls in South Jersey. In January 2001 Comcast swapped 750,000 subscribers in Chicago, Sacramento, Colorado, Florida and Georgia for 750,000 AT&T Broadband subs in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida and Michigan. The same month it closed a swap with Adelphia that bolstered its New Jersey cluster.

One of the challenges Comcast had in South Jersey was dealing with a stew of systems that started out as upwards of 20 small systems that went through a series of mergers, says Greg Arnold, the regional VP for all of New Jersey. Because of the number of acquisitions that had preceded the acquisition by Comcast, the company was faced with skepticism from local franchise boards, Arnold explains.

"A lot of promises had been made by previous operators about coming services and what the cable systems can do that were never lived up to," he says. "That left us in the interesting position of having never dealt with these franchises and having a credibility issue."

It took some convincing to overcome the dubiety of franchise officials when they heard Comcast promise it would upgrade the cable plant and deliver digital and other advanced services. But at that point they weren't yet familiar with Mike Doyle, the president of Comcast's Eastern division, whose single-minded focus was to get the digital platform into as many homes as possible.

"It's a fast-moving world working for Mike," says Arnold. "He challenges you to do better, to do things in different ways."

The franchise boards soon realized that Comcast had no intention other than to keep its word - for its own benefit.

To get a jump on rolling out digital, the company needed to be as aggressive as possible. All told, Comcast invested about $680 million upgrading the South Jersey plant.

"We wanted to take advantage of every means we could now that all of these products were available," Doyle says, referring to digital and high-speed data.

The investment appears to be paying off in a big way. South Jersey enjoys better-than-average penetration of digital and high-speed Internet, with penetration rates of basic subscribers of about 43% and 22%, respectively - not to mention the average of $70 a month that Comcast takes in from South Jersey subscribers. "We're seeing huge numbers on all the product lines," Doyle adds.

Doyle says that his job, which includes overseeing the management of just over 5 million video subscribers in Comcast's Eastern division (its largest), is to make sure he has the right people in the right jobs, "and to make sure they are thinking of new ways to offer our products."

In South Jersey, the right person is Amy Smith, a rising star in the Comcast firmament who started in the company nine years ago as a business manager in Charleston, S.C. Smith "combines certain ingredients," Doyle says. "No. 1, she's very smart. She's very aggressive, she knows how Comcast runs its businesses and she's very good with people."

Although very decentralized, Comcast is also very standardized. Management teams are structured so they "have control of their own destiny," Doyle says.

In South Jersey, that meant some changes were made when Smith came aboard. One of the first things she did was institute a review of all processes and procedures. Procedures in Cherry Hill were very different from those in Vineland, for example. That led to confusion, especially for the customer account executives (a.k.a. customer service reps). Where it made sense, those procedures were standardized. They also have two key members of the tech team working closely with the call center to ensure the two teams are in sync.

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South Jersey Shines In Philly's Shadow

Cable World, July 14, 2003

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