The best part of Cablevision’s latest ridiculous advertising campaign is the 12-month introductory price new subscribers will pay for phone, broadband, and television service: $84.95 a month. Not bad. The same cannot be said to the advertising agency that created this mess and the executives who approved it.
Richard Greenfield from BTIG Research, which covers Cablevision for Wall Street, isn’t impressed with Cablevision’s ads either:
We believe it is time for Cablevision to find a new ad agency, bring in some new marketing executives internally and seriously rethink what their consumer proposition is – going back to pitching the triple-play at an ever lower (now $84.95 price point) is not particularly compelling. Cablevision already has very high level of bundling of video, data and voice services across its customer base. Given that, Cablevision should be devising a marketing approach to upsell existing customers, especially higher speed, higher ARPU broadband services (given their high margin).
Consumers concerned about the high cost of cable may not agree with Greenfield’s assessment. Paying $85 a month for a triple play package is a great deal, at least until it expires.
But we suspect a lot of consumers will never get that far through the ad, particularly when most viewers don’t pay that much attention to advertising in the first place.
Michael Bolton was bad. This is worse:
[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Cablevision Ad – MIDWULS 6-2013.flv[/flv]
Cablevision tries to spell something out based on its toll-free number. MIDWULS is the embarrassing result. We’re especially not buying the culturally updated West Side Story gang encounter. (1 minute)
$85 for 1st year bundle? WOW, that’s a good deal. Of course, I don’t live anywhere near Cablevision territory, NOR do I know how much the 2nd year would cost.
I pay $89 for Frontier 3MBS DSL/hardwire phone per month, and $90 for DirecTV per month.