The 'Local' Cable Guy

Cable World,  Nov 11, 2002  

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Byline: ANDREA FIGLER

Mark Archer walks up behind a woman with long blond hair who's sitting in her cubicle, staring at a computer screen. She's on Ebay, looking at a beautiful blue Hermes handbag at a starting bid of $8,500. The woman acknowledges Archer's greeting, but just barely. The bag's exquisite design has her transfixed.

"I want this bag," she moans. "I luuuuuuuv it."

A few colleagues compliment the woman on her fine taste. But Archer, a senior account executive for the nation's second-largest cable interconnect, goes a step further. "I'll buy it for you," he tells her, half-jokingly, "if you buy the new Taken package."

The woman, you see, is a media buyer for an ad agency that funnels millions of dollars into the company Archer works for, Los Angeles-based Adlink. And if she decides to buy the $100,000 ad package for Taken, Steven Spielberg's upcoming miniseries on the Sci Fi Channel, it will help line Archer's pockets as well. His compensation from this particular sale won't cover the handbag's cost, but buying it for the woman would give him, in essence, an E-ticket to stroll the agency's hallways with great ease.

Why? Because the Hermes bag would make the media buyer's life that much easier and more enjoyable. And Archer's job is to make media buyers' lives easier and more enjoyable.

Welcome to the world of local ad sales where, if you haven't noticed, interconnects are the future. Adlink's former CEO Charlie Thurston, now president of Comcast Corp.'s ad sales division, plans to create state-of-the-art interconnects in each of the MSO's markets (see page 18). Including the AT&T Broadband systems, that means over 70 markets nationwide and 22 of the top 25 DMAs are going to be interconnected and luring more regional and national advertising to local markets - aggressively competing with broadcast for cable's fair share of the advertising pie.

With the future for local cable ad sales close at hand, Cable World decided to find out what it's like to sell cable ads for an interconnect. Adlink agreed to let me follow Archer around for a week with the understanding that client names and certain information be kept confidential.

Before Archer set out to pitch his media buyers, he first had to make it easier for them to understand cable ratings, a difficult task for any account executive. In his tenth-floor office overlooking one of L.A.'s busiest freeways, the 38-year-old complains that Nielsen Media Research demographic ratings for local cable markets tend to fall short, making it difficult, if not impossible, to sell to major media buyers. While overnight ratings are accurate, the overall monthly diaries of demographic data look puny for cable viewing in local markets. A diary must list the channel, the time, the program and the network in order to be included in the demographic. If one of those elements doesn't match or one section is blank, Nielsen tosses it.

This way of determining ratings is outdated, Archer says. Who in their right mind remembers the exact time, channel and network in a sea of hundreds of digital channels, a vat of repurposed programming and a slew of cable operator lineup changes? So, according to the diaries, even though the channel might have been turned on in the household, it looks as if nobody was watching it in Los Angeles.

This "zero cell" for a network rating is the kiss of death, and overcoming it is an account executive's greatest challenge.

Zero cells just don't work when it comes to media buyers. These people need numbers, they seek ratings, they want demographics, and they demand costs per point.

Enter Archer's local skew analysis. As he starts to click the Los Angeles market skew data on his computer screen, the phone rings.

"Mark here," he answers, listening earnestly. "Yes, November first. The Lakers. I've got two for you. I'll bring them to you tomorrow."

Two tickets, that is. Tickets are key to Archer's business. Tickets to the Lakers, the Clippers, the Kings and many concerts at the Staples Center. Whatever is happening around town, Archer or someone at Adlink has tickets to it. If the suite at Adlink is taken up, there are always scalpers. (Archer's colleagues refer to him as the whiz when it comes to tickets.)

Tickets make a client's life more enjoyable. So Archer spends a good portion of his free time, evenings and weekends hanging out at games and concerts with his media buyers. For Archer, tickets mean business. They are cable's future growth. Even his sales manager Theresa Spalding told staffers in a meeting earlier that morning that - to compete with broadcast television - tickets must be included in all sports pitches from now on.

Archer hangs up the phone. Back to the skew. My skeptical journalistic antenna starts to quiver. After all, one definition of "to skew" is to distort.

Archer counters this skepticism. The skew analysis starts with taking the national household ratings for a network at a specific time and comparing it to its subsequent national rating for a particular age group. Take VH1, for example. In March, VH1 totaled a 0.2 national household rating and a 0.2 rating for 18- to 34-year-olds between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. That same pattern continued in June and in August. That means the index, or skew, between the two numbers is 100%. If the overnight household rating for VH1 in Los Angeles is a 0.7, for instance, the corresponding demographic for 18- to 34-year-olds can then be 0.7 as well. If the national household rating for Comedy Central was 0.3 in March between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. and its national rating for 18- to 34-year-olds was 0.2 for the same time period, the skew is 67%. If this skew remains constant month after month, Archer applies it to Los Angeles. For instance, if the overnight household rating for Comedy Central in Los Angeles is 0.7, then with a 67% skew, the demographic rating for 18- to 34-year-olds is 0.47 for Los Angeles.