Intellectual Property Law

Cable Launches $1 Million Blog-Centric Image Campaign

By Cynthia Brumfield

Just when I had concluded that the U.S. cable industry would forever be controlled by PR luddites, Comcast let the world know it monitors Twitter, the cutting-edge microblogging tool that few companies embrace. Now, the industry's trade association, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), has today kicked off a $1 million image advertising campaign that not only includes big ad spends on a number of high-profile blogs (in a very misguided move IP Democracy is not one of those blogs) but also links those ads directly to...NCTA's blog.

The campaign ad itself is relatively generic, promoting's cable's historical capital spending on the construction of broadband networks and the industry's success in jumpstarting competition to the telephone business. In fact, cable's whole goal in launching the campaign is to position the industry as a successful rival to big phone companies.

This message is even more clearly evident after users click on the ad's hyperlink, which leads directly to NCTA's blog CableTechTalk. In preparation for the campaign, the blog features five items posted yesterday that highlight cable's role in spurring voice competition. The subtext of this new push (which will run through the industry's trade show next month) is that even though Kevin Martin hates cable and thinks operators charge too much for video service and despite the still-fresh wounds inflicted by the Comcast P2P nightmare, cable has managed to do one unambiguous good thing for society, which is to effectively end the century-old telephone service monopoly.

Whether the campaign succeeds in changing policymakers' minds (it is an inside the Beltway campaign -- ads are geocoded so that only Washington market readers receive them) is almost irrelevant to me. What's very cool is that cable is getting savvy in terms of the blogosophere and is trying to use its own blog for effective communication. That's a big step.

Even cable foes admire this initiative. One top telco executive told me "that's fantastic.. they say they?re interested in this dialog now, that's awesome." Even the campaign's thrust -- cable competes with the telcos -- got an approving nod from this executive, who represents one of cable's two top phone company competitors. "It?s a reminder to policymakers that they put us out of business at their own peril," he said.

The mix of blogs where the ads appear is interesting given that the highest profile ones are not oriented toward policymakers and, to the best of my knowledge, dont' draw large numbers of DC readers. Here's the list of all ad publications getting NCTA's dough:

Techdirt, Gigaom (run by blogging pioneer and good friend Om Malik) and Gizmodo are huge, but with the possible exception of Techdirt, do a lot of folks in Washington read them? Red State, Lifehacker and Daily Kos are political blogs that make sense. The Consumerist also makes sense given the high number of public interest-oriented DC types that read it. Every other publication is mandatory for any kind of political advertising in Washington.

It doesn't really matter though. The point is that cable is coming up the PR learning curve at quite a rapid clip. Stay tuned for more.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on April 08, 2008 (boomark / email).