Cox's Launching Pad Salutes the Customer

Cable World, Jan 13, 2003

"We will have a similar product to [Cox] San Diego's FreeZone [VOD] service, but a little different," says Bowers. "The FreeZone launch in San Diego is mostly national advertising, with some local tied into the San Diego Zoo. We are looking at some national but more focused on the local business model."

Localism is key to each of the services Cox offers residents and businesses in Hampton Roads, where DirecTV started offering local channels last year.

"Cable is local, any way you cut it. Obviously we have national brands such as ESPN, but the community we serve is so important to our success," Bowers says. "So we're planning features such as local restaurant zones in our FreeZone."

Local advertising is another big revenue generator for Hampton Roads, one of nine Cox markets deploying SeaChange International's local digital ad insertion technology.

Sharon Frazier, VP and general manager of CableRep Advertising in Hampton Roads, has seen her team win larger shares of the area's biggest advertisers during her tenure. "Automotive is our largest category, whereas it used to be that auto dealers would put only a small percentage into cable," she says.

Henry Ayer, who runs Pomoco Auto Group, didn't take much convincing. "As soon as cable came into existence we jumped on it," he says. "It offered us more channels and more avenues to put our message out there, at a better rate. Now we don't buy broadcast ads at all, just 10% to radio, 60% on newspaper and 30% on cable."

Ayer has even appeared in a TV commercial for Hampton Roads CableRep and urges it on his friends outside the automotive business. "Cable took us from being a small mom-and-pop Chrysler store to a high-volume business," he says of one of his dealerships. "I run the Nissan dealership, and our sales are up 20% for the year, which I credit to cable."

He likes the variety of networks available on cable, which Pomoco buys run-of-schedule. "We target women pretty heavily, although we have a broad demographic agewise and economically so we also try to hit the MTV crowd, sports fans with ESPN, lifestyle networks and business networks like MSNBC instead of a shotgun approach."

Frazier says the tide turned with other auto dealers during the GM strike a few years ago, when Cox ran a commercial saying "now's a great time to buy a GM car." "People thought dealerships were closed, and we just wanted to add our support - they really appreciated we were there for them," she says.

The next-largest ad categories are media, with local TV and radio stations buying spots on cable, followed by furniture retailers.

The growth in ad sales has almost doubled the staff since 1996, from 35 to 67 CableRep employees and from two sales teams - in Newport News and Chesapeake - to four teams to handle the large geographic area. The system straddles the James River, creating two distinct markets known as "southside" (Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Norfolk and Portsmouth) and "the peninsula" (Gloucester, Hampton, New Kent, Newport News, Poquoson, York County, James City County, West Point and Williamsburg).