• by Aaron Baar , September 12, 2012

Every day is filled with little frustrations and worries, both big and small. In a new advertising campaign for its Optimum service offering, Cablevision suggests that technology and connectivity shouldn’t be one of them. 

The new effort, from advertising agency Mother in New York, suggests consumers have more important things to worry about every day than whether their television, Internet or phone services are working. A new spot demonstrates these every day inconveniences (such as a child trapped in a dog door, water turning off mid-shower, a key breaking in a lock and an uncomfortable meeting with a child’s teacher), while a voiceover explains: “We do our best work behind the scenes, which is good because you have enough going on. … We sweat the small stuff and the big stuff, so you can sweat your stuff.”

“The theme is you have more important things to worry about than whether your [telecommunications service] is working,” Kristin Dolan, senior executive vice president of product management and marketing, tells Marketing Daily. “But our underlying theme for the campaign is ‘honest connections,’ – that our relationship is going to be based in honesty.”

That honesty will extend to customers in the form of detailed explanations about service outages, and the work required to get them back up, and having a “more proactive dialogue with people, rather than waiting for them to come to us,” Dolan says. 

The campaign, which also includes a re-designed logo for Optimum, is the company’s first branding around the offering in a decade. (Like AT&T’s U-verse or Comcast’s Xfinity, Optimum is Cablevision’s branded service offering covering its telephone, cable and Internet services.) Most advertising efforts for Optimum over the past 10 years have been focused on tactical customer acquisition, rather than this one, which has at its focus customer retention, Dolan says. The campaign came about after the company conducted a six month evaluation of the company and the Optimum brand in the marketplace. 

“We underwent an existing analysis of the brand, and what we thought it could be and the possibilities that were open for it,” Dolan says. “’Optimum’ was a brand that was perceived as neutral, but the category of it was the one that has negative connotations.”

After the initial round of television spots (which includes the Anthem spot as well as other spots laying out the brand promise), subsequent advertising will tie that promise directly to the services Cablevision offers, Dolan says.