Marvin Davis, Comcast

For better or worse, Marvin Davis is a cable guy. Not the Jim Carrey kind, thankfully, although given his brief flirtation with stand-up comedy, he probably could be. Davis knows quite a bit about the importance of humor in marketing, too. But rest assured: He is the real deal. As svp-marketing at Comcast Corp., America's largest cable operator, Davis is probably the only cable guy you'll see at an ANA convention (and not just because he's won a Marketer of the Year award), save for the cable network reps who float around the periphery in hopes of peddling some ad time. That's because, among cable TV operators, there is Comcast, and then there is everyone else. With 23.3 million subscribers spread across much of the U.S., Comcast is 9 million subscribers ahead of No. 2 Time Warner Cable. It is only 4.5 million subscribers behind the two major satellite TV companies: DirecTV, with 15.4 million subscribers; and the Dish Network, with 12.46 million. Comcast is also growing, quickly.Comcast was founded by Ralph Roberts in Tupelo, Miss., in 1963 (Roberts is now 86 and sits on the board of directors, while his son, Brian, is chairman and CEO). It grew over the years into a top 10, and then top five, cable operator. It tripled in size in 2002, when it acquired AT&T Broadband, the nation's largest cable operator at the time. Comcast now has a service footprint that touches 41 states, including 20 of the top 25 U.S. markets. As such, it is the first cable TV operator to become a true national advertiser. Which is why it hired Davis last year. Of course, Comcast had already had competent marketing people. But it didn't have a Davis.In fact, not many other companies have a Davis, either. At the tender age of 42, Davis has already achieved the kind of iconic status in marketing that is normally reserved for people who are about to retire. While his resume boasts early work at Procter & Gamble on the Crest and Metamucil brands, Davis will forever be associated with one of those rare ad slogans that has bled into the popular culture. In his case, the line is "Can you hear me now?" via Bozell Worldwide, which propelled Verizon Wireless, where Davis was vp-advertising, into the top three among domestic cellular service providers."Steve Burke says it's is going to be on my tombstone," quipped Davis, referring to his boss, the evp and COO of Comcast. But, he added, "Success for me will be when I get to the point where no one wants to talk to me about Verizon Wireless and only wants to talk about what I've done at Comcast."On that count, so far so good. Since joining Comcast in February 2005, Davis has hired a new ad agency, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, and greenlighted what remains the first unified branding campaign for the increasingly complex menu of cable services. It can be stated in one word, er, slogan: Comcastic. And it uses humor, an arena where cable companies—which have replaced the phone company as the utility everyone loves to hate—have had little success."My initial reaction to it was, that it was very bold, very daring," said Davis. "We were still a cable company. If you go too far in trying to say that you're this great fun something that you're not, then people will reject it. Candidly, some may have had some concern."Those individuals included Brian Roberts and Burke, who sensed that Davis himself was not so sure it would work when he first presented the idea for the campaign. Davis clarified that point: "I said to them, 'Look, you guys wouldn't be seeing this if I didn't like it, if I didn't think something could happen here. I just wanted to make sure that we're careful . . . but you know what, that's an easy thing for me to test and I can come back in four weeks and tell you. We went away and we tested it, and we were bullish on it."Thanks to the success of the Comcastic effort, which extended online with a neat bit of "puppet theatre," higher-ups at the company are equally bullish on Davis. "Marvin has certainly brought our creative and messaging to another level," said Dave Watson, evp-operations and the person to whom Davis immediately reports. "When you're building a brand, you have to deliver messages that cut through the clutter. 'Comcastic' has done that, with Marvin leading the charge."The campaign, which launched last October, features a series of offbeat vignettes using slice-of-life (though highly improbable) scenes to promote Comcast's "triple play" of video, Internet and digital telephone services. In one group of ads, children are cast as adults in a business office discussing the merits of the kids' programming offered by Comcast. In another, the high speed in Comcast's Internet service is metaphorically portrayed by a mercury-like substance that, when rubbed on one's hands or ingested, allows for the rapid completion of everyday chores. Yet another uses a pair of lugubrious snapping turtles (aka "the Slowskies") set in a typical home wryly taking about how they really prefer the speed of DSL Internet service because Comcast's is much too fast.Comcast has tapped into pop culture and built its kitschy brand in a manner previously unheard of among cable companies. It hired the inimitable Mr. T to promote its entertainment offerings as a way of keeping one from becoming a "culture fool." In one of its more memorable spots, it redubbed archival footage of the $20,000 Pyramid game show using actual Loretta Swit (of Mash fame) re-recordings to update the episode's final clue-giving round. "HDTV. High-speed Internet. On-demand movies," Swit offers, and the contestant answers: "Things that are Comcastic!" The spot ends in a jubilant embrace.Why, one may ask, did Comcast go for this kind of quirky humor? "First of all, humor, when done well, does break through and achieve the kind of memorability you want to have," explained Davis. "Second, if people are smiling and laughing, that kind of goes with [likability]. And third, it allows you to be competitive and hard-hitting with your message without being mean spirited."Harold Sogard, vice chairman and partner at Goodby, noted Davis' early concerns with the approach. "He was initially very skeptical about Comcastic, but he gave the idea time to gel," said Sogard. "[The term] is a superlative, and it's hard for a company to live up to it. But he gave us the freedom and the rope to let the idea come together."While Comcast's marketing has gelled, its business has taken off. For the first half of this year, Comcast posted record revenues (up 11% to $12.1 billion) and growth of services. The latter is measured in "revenue generating units," which, in plain English, are customers for at least one of Comcast's services. Revenue generating units were up 61% (1.8 million) to 43.2 million for the first six months of the year. Broken down, that means almost 700,000 new digital video subscribers (including those that switched from basic analog); more than 700,000 high-speed Internet subscribers; and 500,000 digital voice (telephone) subs.Ian Olgeirson, senior analyst at Kagan Research, Denver, believes that Comcast is well positioned against its competition from the two major satellite TV operators, DirecTV and Echostar (Dish), and the phone companies, primarily AT&T and Verizon. The satellite companies are still growing, but "their growth rate has slowed," Olgeirson said. Comcast's ability to bundle phone and high-speed data, he added, "has taken some of the momentum out of the satellite services."While telephone companies are offering video service in a small number of markets, it is not deployed widely enough to be considered competitive with Comcast. "There are areas where Verizon, in particular, has released its FiOS (Fiber Optic Service) with video package, but the video availability remains fairly limited," said Olgeirson. "Comcast is certainly facing competition, but it is not something that has arrived yet. Their DSL offering remains budget oriented."Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, New York, agreed. "For years, cable operators have been playing defense against satellite. . . . Now the tide is turning," he said. "Peers like Cablevision have already demonstrated that the 'triple play' bundle is the secret sauce in the competition with satellite. They're later to the game than some, and they have a bigger, more complex footprint. But there's no longer any question that, as long as they execute, this is a game they can win."Olgeirson is impressed with Comcast's growth, but does not necessarily attribute it to marketing. "Laying the groundwork for offering digital voice and data way ahead of the competition at a $100 price point is the secret sauce there," he said, adding: "How that is marketed is certainly a part of it. But the value proposition is what is driving it."Olgeirson thinks there will be some subscriber churn later this year when Comcast's $99 monthly promotional offer for video, voice and data service begins expiring and prices move to the $130 per month range. Still, Comcast has already helped take a bite out of VoIP upstart Vonage, a Brandweek Marketer of the Year in 2005, whose subscriber growth rates have fallen sharply since the company went public in May.Even with the price hikes, Olgeirson doesn't expect the sky to fall for Comcast: "By all measures, they are not doing this with smoke and mirrors. They have a good, solid base of strategies and products."Davis, meanwhile, is prepared for this eventuality. "The triple play has been a good driver this year," he said. "It resets the value equation for all three of our products. We think that the triple play, even for the post-promotional price, is still a really great value."Davis has spent much of his life preparing for eventualities, and that in turn prepared him for a career in marketing. He grew up in Memphis, Tenn., where he did the things most kids do. He took up the violin in the fourth grade, but, as he recalled, "When I got to junior high school, I realized, as shallow as it may be, girls aren't screaming over the violin player. So I switched to saxophone in seventh grade."That led to a brief but rewarding career in music. He joined the jazz band in high school and a garage band that played early-'80s R&B music in local venues. But after cracking advanced placement calculus in his senior year, it was goodbye music, hello business school. And, later, marketing. "Procter & Gamble made a presentation in my [college] retail management class," he recalled. "That's the first I'd heard of brand management, and I just jumped up and said, 'That's what I want to do.' "He took a job in retail merchandise management at J.C. Penney and did stand-up comedy in local nightclubs before landing his first marketing job at P&G. "P&G was unbelievable," he said. "People ask me if it really is such great training. The training is as advertised . . . It was about as fair and balanced a playing field as you'll find in Corporate America, meaning you kind of know that if you're doing really well, you got a pretty good sense of being evaluated objectively."From there it was off to GTE Wireless, where he handled marketing for the Bay area in California. He moved up the ranks at what became Verizon Wireless when GTE, Bell Atlantic Mobile, Primeco and Airtouch merged, taking the reins as vp-advertising at the company's headquarters in Warren, N.J. Enter "Can you hear me now?""Sprint PCS was dominating the category" then, Davis recalled. "They were on a 14th-consecutive-quarter roll of leading the category in subscriber growth. The challenge for Verizon Wireless was that we knew we had the best product, but we weren't getting credit for it."Research showed that network quality was ranked fifth on the list of reasons why people chose a particular wireless company. Said Davis: "We were like, wow: The thing that is our biggest differentiator doesn't seem to matter to customers. My view was that if I can make that matter, if I can make the quality of the network the reason that people select, we win."The imperative was handed to Bozell, which developed three concepts. One of those, the "test man," was not the favorite of top management. "Whether people liked it or not, it was my call. So that's the one we went with," said Davis. "It was arguably one of the most expensive casting assignments any agency has undertaken."The campaign had an immediate impact, helping Verizon surpass Sprint subscriptions in the first full quarter following its launch. But imbuing consumers with an indelible tagline was not enough to satisfy Davis, who aspired to a chief marketing officer position. Such a role was not available at Verizon Wireless."The good thing is that I wasn't in a rush," he said. "When the Comcast call came, I got excited about it for a number of reasons. One, it was still in the technology, the communications field, which I was excited about. It was a company that had demonstrated a boldness and a vision. The geography was nice, it was still on the East Coast [in Philadelphia]. The more I got to meet with the leadership here, the more I got to know about the company, I thought it was a really good cultural fit."And it is, for all purposes, a CMO position. "We don't use that title, but yes, that is the role here," he explained.In addition, it is unusual for an outsider to be plucked for such a noteworthy position in the cable industry. Many cable execs have grown up with the relatively young industry, which is not generally known for sophisticated branding. Yet, Davis has had a considerable impact on the business.Consider the views of two cable industry leaders . . .Mark Hotz, svp-marketing at NBC Universal Networks, serves on the board of the Cable & Telecommunications Assn. for Marketing, the industry's marketing arm, along with Davis. "Marvin is a great guy," said Hotz. "He really came in here very quickly and seized the moment. He understands the multiplatform space. He's made a substantial impact in a short amount of time."Char Beales, president and CEO of CTAM, agreed: "[Davis is] a quick study. He's brought a completely new perspective to cable. What he has done is very different from anything that has been done before in cable. When you think of cable advertising, there's a lot of sameness. Hey, it worked. At first, people were like, 'Oh my God, what's that about?' It was such a different approach."Now, they are all cheering, which is not unusual in the cable business. As local monopolies, these companies do not, as a rule, compete with one another. There is a lot of idea sharing that goes on, particularly in marketing, which is one reason why so much cable operator advertising looks the same.Beales said Davis was first a little puzzled by this, coming from the ultracompetitive businesses in which he'd been working. But he is now one of them—the cable people, that is—according to Beales.If Davis has a guiding principle of marketing, it is that people, in this case, all people, matter. And what people think and like and do in their lives matters. This is where his experience in music and comedy has served him well, along with his formidable knowledge of pop culture. He actually watches, and likes, television, and he thinks all marketers should do the same."The first thing is starting from a really intimate, in-depth understanding of people," he explained. "Understand them, not only how they feel about the product, but their buying behavior, what's important to them. Starting from a clear body of knowledge of who they are.""The next thing," he said, "is finding something that is broadly appealing and understandable as far as our message. That's actually a challenge with advertising agencies and marketers in general, because marketers and advertising agency personnel are usually very much unlike the masses. That goes to imagery, that goes to language, that goes to why someone is going to look at it and say, 'I see how I'm going to use that.' "Finally, he added: "From those two, just being honest about what we can really do. A brutal honesty about what you as a brand, as a company, as a product can realistically deliver to people."Maybe someday those words will show up in a textbook at business school. Presumably under the heading, "Can you hear me now?" Photo by Chris Crisman

Brand Marketing

Marvin Davis, Comcast

Bill Gloede

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