Thursday, June 14, 2007
Duh! at&t Should Have Talked to Some Cable Guys
at&t is promoting U-Verse IPTV services in Connecticut from an Ice Cream truck outfitted with a flat panel HDTV showing off the service. at&t also is holding U-Verse block parties and free concert or movie nights. It sounds as though the new tack is being taken because mass media advertising is a mixed blessing when a company is in the middle of a network build. Apparently at&t has finally discovered that it creates problems for itself when it advertises new services that only are available in a portion of a service territory reached by the mass media where the ads run.
Potential customers call in to get it and then have to be told service isn't available in their neighborhood. That's why cablers used to send out people with door hangers block by block as networks were built out. They tended to use the same "micro" targeting as their networks successively were upgraded. at&t couldn't ask anybody who had ever done this before what the pitfalls would be? It's not like it would have cost any money to get the insight. It's a one-sentence question and a one-sentence answer.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
What Declining Industry Can Afford to Alienate Half its Customers?
Some people believe the new trend of major U.S. newspapers declining to make endorsements in presidential races is an abdication of their “p...
-
We have all repeatedly seen comparisons of equity value of hyperscale app providers compared to the value of connectivity providers, which s...
-
It really is surprising how often a Pareto distribution--the “80/20 rule--appears in business life, or in life, generally. Basically, the...
-
Is there a relationship between screen size and data consumption? One might think the answer clearly is “yes,” based on the difference bet...
No comments:
Post a Comment