Local advertising sales have been growing for cable operators for the past several years, but as in the rest of the media, local cable ad sales have struggled in the wake of a recessed economy. Still, there are success stories in which local ad sales have been highly effective and financially and emotionally rewarding. Here is one such story.

It took nine years for Michael Timar's ideal ad campaign to come to fruition, but when it did, it exceeded everyone's expectations ? including Timar's.

The idea: Create a promotion that everyone in the community would talk about and that would deliver goodwill and drive traffic for the client. The concept: Hire a group of entertainers to dress up as elves during the Christmas holiday season and have them perform random acts of kindness around the community, compliments of the client. That client ended up being a strip mall in Prescott, Ariz. Timar, Cable One's regional sales manager, and local advertising executive Jerry Lehfeldt, convinced the Frontier Village retailers to sponsor the idea and the Frontier Village kindness elves were born.

Local Cable One execs had been trying unsuccessfully to sell the retailers local cable avails for years, Timar says. ?Finally, we met with the mall manager and learned of the mall and community politics, the frustrations, the negative attitudes and complete lack of any successful events or promotions in the past as well as the corporate mandate to fix this. At this point we knew we had a desperate manager who was willing to listen to any viable solution. We proposed the idea of the kindness elves. He liked the concept, and we were in business.?

The Frontier Village is a large strip center mall built on land leased from a local Indian tribe. It has more than 50 stores with a core of about eight national chain stores that include Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target, Office Max and Ross, a number of local and regional franchises and a few individually owned specialty stores. Timar says the idea of sponsoring a community-oriented campaign enticed the retailers.

?The message was for everyone to perform his or her own random acts of kindness,? he says, ?Ideally, together we might make this a better place to live.?

Cable One, which counts some 31,000 cable customers in Prescott, developed 18 fictitious TV news spots to promote the campaign. The ads were created as breaking news items with a studio anchor and a field reporter who would follow the kindness elves on their missions.

These good deeds would range from handing out cups of hot chocolate and candy canes to visiting a local utility company or supermarket and paying some customers' bills,? Timar says. ?We would deliver gift baskets to teachers lounges in all the local schools, take gifts to retirement homes and deliver dinner to the local police and fire stations. The list of acts of kindness just kept growing.?

The mall retailers were hip to the feel-good nature of the campaign, but they also wanted to attract customers. ?We had opportunities for every merchant to get involved with gift donations, participation in giant stocking giveaways, a Nickelodeon Rugrats coloring adventure for the kids or the opportunity to not participate if they chose,? Timar says.

The retailers gave Cable One $28,000 the first year to fund the entire campaign. The initial plan was to reach between 1,500 and 3,000 people in the community with the campaign, but the promotion went over so well and the retailers were so enthusiastic that more than 17,500 good deeds were done during the four-week campaign, Timar says.

Indeed, the elves became so popular that the local newspaper ran a front page story on the campaign and the ABC affiliate from Phoenix did a feature story on a day in the life of a kindness elf. There were three editorials in the local newspaper on how positive the promotion was and a local independent TV station had elves visit the station during the local weather forecast twice during the promotion.

When the promotion was completed, the Frontier Village management company had only one concern: They wanted to ensure that the promotion was done every year and that it had exclusive rights to it, Timar says.

?We ended up billing more than $30,000 in revenue the second year, and we expect the campaign to keep growing,? Timar says. ?Clearly, this isn't a campaign for just any advertiser. It requires a lot of commitment from a client that is willing to go full boat with a promotion.?

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