• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, May 5, 2010

Rachel Dreyfus is vice president, marketing intelligence, at Time Warner Cable, and is co-chair of the Research Conference Committee for the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing Research & Insight Conference, which is taking place in Los Angeles from May 12-14.

Dreyfus currently leads all aspects of Time Warner Cable's consumer research and competitive intelligence. In her interview with me, she talks about some of her current projects, the Nielsen Three Screen Study, and changes in her side of the business over the past five year.

Direct links to the full interview videos can be found at the WeislerMedia blog. Below is an excerpt.

Charlene Weisler: Rachel, what are you working on right now?

Rachel Dreyfus: Working on a lot of things right now simultaneously. But the most important thing for the year 2010 is going to be improving our customer experience. Our industry has talked about that for at least 20 years or more. But now, with the competitive environment the way it is and our video market share challenged with the phone, and the Internet category slowing in terms of growth and potential -- we really need to focus on the customer experience.

So a lot of our research is focused on guiding our decisions in terms of what is important to the customer. What do we really need to do to provide a branded Time Warner Cable customer experience that will make customers engaged with our company, for more of a two-way relationship with our customers? Not just send them a bill every month, but show them some love, show them some appreciation for their business and in turn hopefully be known as the provider who deserves their business....

CW: You have been involved in the Nielsen Three Screen Study. Can you tell me anything that you discovered from the study? Anything that surprised you? Anything that you found particularly noteworthy?

RD: Yes. The study was very interesting because they were tracking, fusing if you will, two different panels: panels of online viewers, and panels of the same consumers who were watching TV traditionally. So Nielsen had these two panels and they found that the top quintile of traditional TV viewers were also in the top quintile of online video viewers. So the finding was that the people who watch the most TV are also the same people who watch the most online video. The conclusion therein was that there won't be any cannibalization, at least there isn't now, of traditional TV viewing from online viewing.

And from the MSO perspective, we have a different point of view on that because as it becomes easier and easier to find the online video, as it becomes better quality, like HD quality, on online video, and as the user experience becomes more convenient -- that's when we will see more and more people jettison one for the other. That is not far away in the future. So right now we are just taking in all the different research that we can on all these topics and trying to synthesize it for ourselves and come up with a point of view and a strategy that will help us prepare and anticipate consumers' future behaviors.

CW: What would you say were the most dramatic changes in the industry in the past five years?

RD: In the past five years social, networking and blogging have overtaken almost any other Internet activity we have -- and they now encompass something like one in every 11 minutes of Internet activity time spent. I think that is really important because consumers are finding information from their own networks of friends more than they might be finding it from mass advertising or from any other media.

And what that does is, it propels Internet ahead of TV as the most crucial service that you can't live without. People are using these tools and getting their recommendations, and word of mouth is spreading. We need to find a way to capitalize on social networking in our company and in our industry so we take advantage of the power that that has to offer us. I don't think anyone has cracked that nut yet from a business perspective. It isn't about forcing information at people or trying to be their friends -- but what I think will happen is that we will figure out the way to use social networking for consumer research purposes, for creating new ideas, passing new programming through the green-light process, and that sort of thing. And when we do, it will be a very powerful tool for our industry.