AT&T Hopes Wash. Campaign Clicks

AT&T Broadband this week will unveil a new marketing strategy in Tacoma, Wash. — one it hopes to use to put more distance between itself and the largest U.S. municipal overbuild.

The MSO will launch a campaign touting its ability to provide consumers with a package of digital cable, high-speed Internet service and local telephony with a single phone call.

Calls will be handled from AT&T's customer call center in suburban Fife, Wash., where some 250 customer-service representatives have been trained to sell all three products. The idea is to have equally trained field technicians make a single installation trip.

"It's one pipe, one market; it should be one truck roll," said AT&T's Washington state vice president of operations Mary White.

White said the Tacoma strategy marks the first time that an AT&T system has placed sales for all three of its products under one umbrella.

"Now we can give a customer one broadband connection with a single phone call," she said.

Director of marketing for high-speed data Jan Wachhoz said the new marketing plan will be supported by a full-scale ad blitz, including direct mail, cross-channel and broadcast TV ads, inserts in monthly bills, direct sales, telemarketing and door hangers.

AT&T already offers all three services in Tacoma, where it competes with the Click Network, a Tacoma Power Utility-owned overbuild that has posted a 28 percent penetration rate among local cable subscribers.

But Click offers only analog cable programming. Its high-speed data offering is delivered by four separate Internet-service providers and it does not offer telephone service, although local officials don't rule that out in the future.

And AT&T's local-telephony offering may make the difference in how consumers respond to the new marketing plan.

The MSO guarantees that customers who accept a new telephone number as part of their package of services will be installed within four days, while those wishing to keep their existing number will have service installed within a week.

Although Click still sells cable and data services separately, local officials aren't convinced the MSO's new one-shop marketing plan will give it a competitive edge. In fact, they believe AT&T is glossing over Click's operating model of an open-access network that offers consumers a choice of Internet-service providers.

"Our customers have a choice," said Click spokeswoman Diane Lachel. "We offer them four robust ISPs, so they're not locked into just one platform. As for cable, we're doing well. Our original business plan called for a 25 percent penetration rate, and we're doing 28 percent."

While AT&T boasts of its ability to deliver three services, Lachel said, Click has already found five applications for its network, including cable, Internet access for residential and area businesses customers, as well as communication between electrical substations and TPU and remote meter reading.

The municipal network has led to the relocation of more than 100 businesses to Tacoma, citing its telecommunications infrastructure, Lachel added.

AT&T spokesman Steve Kipp admitted that the MSO's cable subscriber numbers have dropped from 47,000 to about 40,000 since the introduction of Click service, but argued the cable operator has more than made up the losses through added telephony and Internet subscriptions.

"The name of the game is not subscriber numbers, but how much each subscriber spends with you," said Kipp. "Our subscribers are spending more with us."

Lachel dismissed a recent AT&T study which indicated that Click was not meeting its original cable subscriber, revenue and profit projections, arguing that the survey concentrated solely on the city's video product.

"It's obvious that AT&T still doesn't get it," she said. "The study focused on cable, which is only one part of what our network does."