Guest Columnist

The New World By Patricia Gottesman, EVP, Product Management and Marketing for Cablevision As we cable marketers gather in Boston this week for the annual CTAM Summit, appropriately titled "The New World," the telephone companies, lacking a marketing conference of their own, may feel left out. It’s hard to celebrate what’s new in the phone business when the boldest specials on your menu are cable services. So, don’t be surprised if the earnest young marketing manager sipping a mojito next to you at Monday’s MTV bash is a phone guy. Believe me, we understand why everyone wants to be part of cable’s New World. Between this July and last, our industry has executed incredible customer growth, having added literally millions of cable voice customers, maintained an outstanding pace of broadband growth and gained more video customers than many of us have seen since the heyday of satellite came and went. We’ve paid our celebration dues by focusing deeply on meaningful transformation and lasting economic success. When we decided to enter the voice business, it wasn’t to burst the telephone pricing balloon and go home. Cable’s goal was to use our existing fiber-rich networks and operating capacity as a platform for delivering new customer value at home and at work, and we’re doing so profitably. We’ve also improved the voice value equation by adding features and functionality for our customers that either didn’t exist or cost an arm-and-a-leg in the old world. And, we’ve built on cable’s position as product and market share leader in the high-speed Internet business by continuing to increase our speeds. One of the newest advances in cable’s new world has been the expansion of the Internet to embrace all of the content and communication available today. With DSL running at a fraction of cable broadband speeds, is there any doubt that cable is the new foundation platform for the Internet? Would we be talking about television over the Web if cable hadn’t built the networks and expanded the customer experience (and the customer base) to cultivate it? Is there any doubt that our industry has been the one to turn advertising into buying, using our interactive networks, the powerful (and now widely used) applications of the PC and romance of TV? Even wireless, where the phone companies have created such respectable brands, is a service that welcomes cable’s progress toward an integrated future. Across the demographic divide, the main things we and our soon-to-be-emancipated kids want from our cell phones is a connection. That connection gets stronger when it’s linked to our home and work PC and our home TV. And the economics of wireless grow more profitable the more integration with cable voice, Internet and digital television services is taken into account. So, we’re justifiably proud of cable’s heritage and prouder still of the fact that this industry keeps renewing its passion for success, growth, expansion, reinvention. We’ve worked hard to put together a couple of days of meaningful learning and celebration this week in beautiful Boston. And, true to CTAM’s charter, we’re going to share knowledge and perspective so that we can all come away from the Summit stronger. We’re going to listen to some of the best cable marketers and we’re going to focus on marketers from other industries who have a role in the integration challenges and clear opportunities ahead. Our forward momentum is based on our passion to stay ahead, to own "best" in everything we do. That’s how our new world keeps expanding and with it, our capacity for success.