telecom

AT&T Sells DirecTV On Its Own Merits

Although AT&T has been selling DirecTV as part of a value proposition within its family of products, the company is still pushing the satellite TV service on its own, stand-alone merits. 

With a campaign launching this week, AT&T is selling DirecTV as a better product than cable overall, suggesting its competitors are having trouble keeping up. “These ads take a fun, fictional look at our cable competitors,” a company representative tells Marketing Daily. “For the past 15 years straight, consumers have rated DirecTV’s customer satisfaction superior to cable and the ads humorously highlight the advantages of DirecTV over cable.”

The television commercials feature recognizable celebrities such as Jeffrey Tambor, Jennifer Coolidge, John Michael Hinckley and Fred Willard, as executives from two rival cable companies, “Cable Corp.” and “Cable World,” that are merging to compete with DirecTV. In the first spot, Tambor, as the head of Cable Corp., explains that the only way to compete is to merge, while other members of his executive board complain about Cable World employees and the company overall. The reveal shows executives from the latter standing in the room with a congratulatory cake. “This is going to be fun. Firing everyone,” says Willard, presumably the head of Cable World. 

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A second spot shows the two companies post-merger, with Cable World executives presenting their big ideas (or lack thereof, “We got messed up last night. You’re lucky we’re even here,” says Coolidge’s character). Their best idea is peel-and-eat shrimp tossed across the boardroom table for breakfast. “Not how I would have gone,” says Tambor’s character, “but it’s good. It’s innovative.”

(The two new ads are a bit of a throwback to a 2008 DirecTV campaign, “Empty Cable Suit,” which featured Higgins as a clueless cable executive. He makes reference to having worked for “Cable World” in the past in the first spot. “‘Empty Cable Suit’ was a hugely successful campaign for DirecTV,” the representative says. “This new campaign, while based on [that campaign] stands on its own.”)

Shortly after its merger with DirecTV, AT&T introduced a campaign that showed customers being able to watch content on nearly any device nearly anywhere. More recently, the company has been touting its “All-in-one” plans (that connect four TVs and four smartphones in one plan) under the banner, “The revolution will be mobilized.” That value proposition is still alive as the new spots reference DirecTV being part of the “AT&T family,” the representative says.

1 comment about "AT&T Sells DirecTV On Its Own Merits".
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  1. Danny Clayton from Kapco, October 5, 2015 at 12:23 p.m.

    John Michael Higgins. 

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