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Starchoice Takes on Rogers in Attack Ads
By Paul Brent Financial Post
Satellite television provider Star Choice Communications Inc. is hoping to tap into what it sees as consumers’ long-simmering hostility toward cable giant Rogers Communications Inc., with an anti-cable advertising campaign launched on TV and in newspapers this week. In what Star Choice describes as the key battleground of Ontario, the first TV ad describes an unnamed cable company as a “bloated monopoly” guilty of negative billing and poor customer service. The satellite company’s Web site has a similar theme, imploring people to “cut the cable.” Star Choice was told by advertising watchdog Telecaster that it could not use Rogers’ name, although it said that in focus group testing few consumers fail to make the connection. (Rogers is running ads critical of the reliability of satellite TV.) “The tales of Rogers Cable, legendary, horrible everything horrible high-handed treatment of consumers was just right in the forefront of our minds,” says Mark Weisbarth, president of Due North Communications, Star Choice’s ad agency. “What we recommended...was a direct attack. They were a ripe target, they were there to be taken a run at.” The Star Choice campaign, by far its biggest marketing effort in its six-year history, is a gamble on many fronts. The most obvious is that the company is owned by Calgary’s cable king, Shaw Communications Inc., the Western Canadian equivalent of Rogers. Outside of Ontario the ads will target large, unresponsive corporations that offer poor service. Star Choice and its ad agency also had to balance what they view as consumers’ antipathy for Rogers with the ambivalence for political-style negative advertising. It settled upon a “John Cusack-like character,” Canadian actor Chris Leavins, who the company hopes can convince people to rip the wires out of their homes in favour of bolting a dish on the roof. (Mr. Cusack, who started as an angst-ridden record store owner in High Fidelity, wanted $5-million to play the staring role for Star Choice). Star Choice likely has little to lose, though, and much to gain. The company is a distant third in the country’s largest market; only 163,000 of its 600,000 subscribers are in Ontario. It is well behind direct-to-home rival Bell ExpressVu, and both are dwarfed by Rogers, which had more than two million subscribers in Ontario at the end of last year. Given that the recent launch of 50-odd digital channels is expected to create some consumer interest in cable versus satellite TV, Star Choice says it has a window of opportunity to lure customers from Rogers. “It is part of the reason why with Shaw management I have been able to sell this aggressive, aggressive tone,” says Michael Kaumeyer, Star Choice’s vice-president of communications. “We can’t do this over a series of years. Now is the time we have to draw a line in the sand.”
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