Not Slacking, Just Being Judicious…

The chorus of voices lashing the television industry, cable included, for slacking too long in addressing advertising’s evolution can seem deafening at times. Here, cable gets some support from what may seem an unlikely ally—the head of Internet and mobile media agency VideoEgg. The digital shop’s CEO Matt Sanchez tells Cathy Applefeld Olson why cable’s time is just arriving now, and how operators can benefit from other companies’ experience.

Cable operators are certainly making strides now toward new ways to reach consumers with advertising. But as the head of an agency that works completely in the digital space, do you think the industry lagged too long?

MS:  That criticism is not fair to those guys. There have been a couple of things happening when you think about the continuum of choice. We started with a couple of channels from the broadcasters and then cable brought hundreds of options, and now we’ve moved on to the Internet and effectively infinite choices. In the last five years the rate of advance in the IT-based environment has been almost inconceivable. To have expected the cable industry as a whole to have kept up with deployed product at that scale—given number of customers they are supporting and their quality of service—is impossible.

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