Vanguard Award for Marketing
by Kent Gibbons -- Multichannel News, 5/19/2008 2:00:00 AM
Samuel Howe
Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
Time Warner Cable
As Time Warner Cable promotes its bundled offering of video, voice and high-speed Internet against rising competition from phone company rivals with their own triple-play packages, it has as its chief marketing officer, Sam Howe, a man as experienced in that battlefield as anyone in cable, his admirers say.
As a marketer at Telewest, in the United Kingdom, he spearheaded what’s believed to be the first deployment of bundled cable: telephone and Internet service on a cable plant in 1995. He was up against pretty tough incumbents on several fronts: most notably British Telecom and Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV satellite-television platform.
Howe first went to the United Kingdom for Cox Communications, as group marketing director for a joint venture between Cox and Southwestern Bell, before shifting to Telewest (now part of Virgin Media).
His cable resume goes back to Centel Cable, in Chicago, in 1982, and in 1985 he’s credited with creating an innovative “60 days’ free cable” campaign.
After a stint at Turner Broadcasting System and, in his words, “a dot-bomb,” he came to Time Warner Cable in 2003 as senior vice president of voice services to launch Time Warner Cable’s digital voice line (which now claims more than 3.1 million subscribers). He was promoted to executive vice president and CMO in July 2005.
He has helped on numerous industry marketing initiatives, including the Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing’s MSO [multiple-system operator] Marketing Co-Op and on the National Cable & Telecommunications Association marketing campaigns, including the digital-TV transition public service announcements that are currently appearing. He also co-chaired last year’s CTAM Summit in Washington, D.C.
“He really has that big picture view of the business,” CTAM president Char Beales said.
For his innovations and leadership abilities Howe is receiving the 2008 Vanguard Award for marketing.
“This is certainly an appropriate honor for Sam,” said David Van Valkenburg, who worked with Howe at Cox and at Telewest.
Van Valkenburg said Howe knows the value of research and of basing marketing messages on a solid foundation. He also knows how to respond quickly and effectively when a competitor adapts. At one point, U.K. telco BT introduced a vastly discounted “friends and family” calling price that undercut Telewest’s claim to be the low-cost telephone provider. Howe’s response was for Telewest to contend its package overall was lowest price — and to offer to pay consumers 10 times the difference in price if they could prove otherwise.
“We had very, very few who tried to take us up on it because we were able to prove that we were cheaper overall,” Van Valkenburg said.
Howe said his experience in the United Kingdom is what brought him to Time Warner Cable. “That was like a competitive frying pan,” he said, battling Murdoch’s Sky (the dominant video player) and BT on phone and Internet.
“I guess I’d say that’s one thing that’s wonderful about this industry,” Howe said. “I went over to help them with video; learned about phone; ended up stumbling into bundling and things a lot of other people in the U.S. did a lot with it afterward, not only ourselves. That’s an exciting thing about how this business works.”
He learned in England the value of being patient with marketing messages, of making good choices based on sound reasoning and sticking with them. “Your competitive battle isn’t all won or lost in a day. You have time to be thoughtful and respond. But you better respond and be aggressive.”
To that end, he’s enthusiastic about Time Warner Cable’s new advertising campaign that features actor Mike O’Malley, of the CBS sitcom Yes Dear. The first one features O’Malley trying to figure out what all the various charges on his Verizon phone bill are for, as opposed to Time Warner Cable’s unlimited calling plan.
“They’re almost political ads,” Howe said. “They take a real shot. They spend most of the time talking about weaknesses of that competitor and finish with a reminder that Time Warner doesn’t have that problem.”
“He’s been a huge champion of really understanding the competition,” Beales said.
She also credited Howe’s organizational skills within Time Warner Cable, executing a regional structure that placed strong marketers within Time Warner’s regions (such as Brian Kelly in the Carolinas, Gregg DiPaolo in the Midwest and John Keib in New York City).
Howe said the company’s six regions have regional marketing chiefs who “are industry vets who really understand a regional marketplace like I can’t.” He added: “I feel my job is to empower regionalism, to make it come alive. Some of that is recognizing what they do best and then how a corporation should serve that.”
Van Valkenburg credited Howe for a scientific method that draws on empirical data: “He is creative, but it’s creativity based upon research and trials and testing rather than taking an idea and flying with it.”
Howe said extensive research helps in finding “the right elegant proposition. I really believe in keeping things simple.”
To that end, Time Warner Cable’s response to DirecTV’s emphasis on the number of high-definition channels carried is to reassure customers Time Warner won’t charge them extra for HD. Howe credits Keib with the tagline “Home of the Free HD.”
A Chicago native, Howe has New England ties dating back to college (Bowdoin, in Maine) and early jobs in radio in New Bedford, Mass., and Boston. He lives in a Connecticut suburb between Time Warner’s corporate poles of New York City and Stamford. When he’s not watching the younger of his two daughters play high-school basketball, he spends as much time as he can sailing his 28-foot sloop, The Rebecca B, on Penobscot Bay. Sam and Rebecca Howe own a lighthouse, circa 1840, on Deer Isle, Maine.
“It’s not too big to singlehand, which I find happens a lot,” he said of his sailboat. “Or on a nice day when more people are happy to come, [it will] take a crowd. I don’t know if it’s a metaphor for careers or life, but it can be singlehanded or it can accommodate a group.”
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