Suddenlink’s Image Spots Go 'Easy'
Humorous Campaign Launched Nov. 1
By Kent Gibbons -- Multichannel News, 10/25/2008 6:21:00 AM
Suddenlink hopes “easy” does it as the basis of a new image campaign.
The cable and broadband provider is ushering in a new tagline — “Easy as counting to one” — with a series of humorous ads starting Nov. 1.
Chief marketing and sales officer Jerry Dow, who joined 1.3 million-subscriber Suddenlink in February, said the company wanted “to find a strategic place where the brand can live long-term.” The old slogan was “Life connected.”
As choices grow for video, phone and broadband services, consumers start to think of them as commodities and the providers as interchangeable, Dow said. “We want to find and communicate what makes us different, and start to differentiate ourselves, not based on tactics and price points, but based on a customer benefit. And we think 'easy' is something we can deliver.”
He said Suddenlink tested several concepts with customers in its operating regions before settling on this one. “Because of the bundle, we can say, with one call and one connection into the house and rolled up on one bill, we can make your communication experience a lot easier.”
Role models for Suddenlink in this effort are Holiday Inn Express, with its “Stay Smart” ads; Southwest Airlines, emphasizing the “freedom to move throughout the country”; and Disney's targeting “the child within,” Dow said.
New ads, by The Richards Group of Dallas, chosen partly for work done for Home Depot and Motel 6, contrast hard and easy experiences. “Hard is: bowling with meat,” for example, as a bearded man flings a trussed roast down a bowling lane. “Easy is: bundling your services with Suddenlink,” as a woman casually plops remotes into a Suddenlink shopping bag. (Search “Suddenlink 4 QRT” in YouTube to see examples.)
To make it, well, easy for the company's different operating regions to customize the messages, the ads are “modular,” to mix and match different easy and hard examples with different product pitches (say, a $30 high-speed Internet offer for 12 months). “There is a place in each commercial for a tactical message,” Dow said. Using online tools, local system marketers can even change what's on a computer screen in a commercial's scene or on a van bumper sticker.
The ads will run on Suddenlink local-ad avails and on local TV stations, radio, print and outdoor media. Dow wouldn't say how much the cable firm would spend on the effort.
He said Suddenlink also would use the brand internally, to try to get employees to think up ways they can make the customer experience easier. There are plans for an internal Web site where employees can make suggestions, including hard-and-easy scenarios for future commercials.
