|
New sports channel BCSN helps Buckeye make the case that although broadcast may have the news, cable's got the eyeballs.
By Mavis Scanlon
At Buckeye Cablesystem in Toledo, Ohio, small steps have added up to big gains. Through mid-November, overall advertising revenue at Buckeye was up about 19% from 2003. Excluding political dollars--local cable stills lags behind broadcast when it comes to national political advertising, but a few heated local races spilled money into cable this year--ad sales were up about 14%. That's due in part to the dozens of accounts that place ads on Buckeye but not on the market's broadcast stations.
Much of this success can be credited to Buckeye's local sports channel BCSN (see "Buckeye Excels at a Game Satellite Can't Play," May 17 issue). The six minutes per hour of commercial inventory were sold out within the first nine to 10 months of the channel's operation. In mid-November commercial avails were boosted to nine minutes an hour.
Steve Piller, VP, advertising, gladly shares the secret to Buckeye's ad sales success. "We succeed or fail based on salespeople," Piller says. True to that credo, Buckeye added three new ad sales positions this year, a pretty big deal for a small cable operator that hasn't had new hires in a long time. The new reps are mining opportunities with small businesses in Toledo that can't afford to advertise on broadcast TV.
"They've got probably one of the best rep teams out there," says Dawn Campbell, owner of Campbell Media Services, which buys advertising time on cable and broadcast for health care, education and nonprofit clients.
 |
| Steve Piller's expanded sales staff is targeting small businesses in Toledo. |
Buckeye's efficient back-office systems help Piller's team do their job more easily. Buckeye's ad sales contact management software is integrated with the company's traffic and billing systems, so every account's history is easily accessible. In addition to logging daily and monthly call reports, the sales reps' performance is reviewed quarterly. It's at those quarterly meetings that monthly budgets are assessed, growth is measured and new business goals are laid out.
"When [the team] gets done with the process, they have, from largest to smallest accounts, a road map of what's going to happen in the next three months," Piller says.
Rookie of the Year
Buckeye's sales team has plenty of ammunition at its disposal: the resources it has developed for small advertisers, its production services and, especially, its homegrown local sports channel.
"BCSN is just absolutely a home run," Piller says. Initiatives at the channel for next year include expanding sponsorship opportunities for advertisers that renew contracts for 2005; such opportunities will include logos displayed during instant replays. Piller's team has brought in several new advertisers for next year, including health care network ProMedica Health System, a Toyota dealer group, Arby's and Myer's, a Wal-Mart-type retailer with stores in Michigan and Ohio.
The channel "was designed so it would be additive to our regular advertisers," says Dave Huey, president of Buckeye parent Block Communications. BCSN's acceptance in the community, which has been "beyond expectations," Huey says, has made the advertising community perk up. Advertisers want to reach BCSN's audience of parents and school-age children. They are "very much in tune with the viewership that the channel can deliver," Huey adds.
One of Campbell's clients, Penta County Vocational School, asked specifically to be on BCSN for three new ad campaigns in 2005. Cable gets about a 30% share of her media buys. Cable's share "probably should be higher," she says, but it would be difficult to get to the 50% share mark because so many of her clients buy spots in broadcast news. "That's really where cable loses out to broadcast."
Individual cable networks can't match the low cost per point of broadcast, Campbell says, but since cable charges less on a per-spot basis, buyers such as Campbell can afford more spots on cable, thereby increasing the reach and frequency.
Follow the Eyeballs
Throughout its history, Buckeye has bucked tradition. Most cable operators in the region do not produce ads for local advertisers, Piller says. Buckeye has been doing it for about 18 years.
Smaller advertisers that don't have big production budgets can take advantage of Buckeye's zoned advertising rates and its Tribune listing service channel--both enable the little guys that can't afford broadcast's rates to get their brand out to a wider audience.
Amid the growing ad-sales market, Piller has faced challenges this year. Auto sales have slowed, leading to cuts in spending in the automotive advertising category, cable's biggest. Through August, domestic sales were down nearly 10% compared with 2003, according to Piller's data, and the year-end figures don't look promising. Ford and GM both reported softer sales in November and announced plans to cut production in the first quarter by 8% and 7%, respectively. To combat the decline in ad dollars, Piller's team is working to provide dealers with added value and marketing services.
Further, without an interconnect--Buckeye's cable neighbors include Time Warner Cable and Adelphia--Piller's national sales manager has had a tough time luring big national accounts. Strategically an interconnect would make sense, he says; without it, he has a harder time fighting for accounts such as Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Weight Watchers and Pizza Hut, to name a few.
The key to getting that business is getting cable's message out. If an advertiser is spending $1.8 million in the market on broadcast, that advertiser must be presented with a justification for moving a percentage of that money to cable, since it gets 40% to 50% of the eyeballs every night, Piller says. "We just keep pounding and pounding that message."
Back to this issue
|
