Sling TV Targets Cord-Cutters With New Ad Campaign
August 30 2016 - 9:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Shalini Ramachandran
Sling TV is making it official: the streaming service is going
after cord-cutters.
Until now, executives at Dish Network Corp., the satellite TV
provider that owns Sling TV, have largely insisted that the
$20-a-month streaming service targets "cord-nevers" -- younger
consumers who have never signed up for a pay TV subscription.
That message was aimed at reassuring big TV companies who were
nervous about licensing just a few of their channels to Sling TV,
rather than their full suite of networks. Part of the concern was
that supporting Sling TV's slimmed-down, cheaper streaming bundle
would encourage more people to "cut the cord," meaning cancel their
traditional pay TV subscriptions, which are still the backbone of
the TV ecosystem.
Now Sling TV executives say they are pulling out all the stops
in a multimillion-dollar campaign aimed at attracting those
cord-cutters.
The nationwide ad campaign, which will run across TV, digital,
print, and social channels, features "Machete" star Danny Trejo
growling about how "evil" and "scary" cable TV companies are, with
their long-term contracts and pricing lures that make you end up
paying more than $100 a month.
In the ad, Sling TV compares those pain points with its low
price, no hidden fees and no long-term contracts -- effectively
encouraging disgruntled cable subscribers to cut the cord and sign
up.
Sling TV Chief Executive Roger Lynch's pitch is that the
streaming service will give a place for fed-up cable customers to
go where they can still pay to watch a selection of TV channels, as
opposed to leave the ecosystem entirely.
"We're not creating sentiment; we're reflecting that it is the
growing percentage of the market," said Sling TV Chief Marketing
Officer Glenn Eisen. The idea with the campaign is to "ratchet up
the tone" against traditional pay TV, he said.
Sling TV's biggest programming partners, including ESPN's
majority-owner Walt Disney Co., have been under pressure from
investors due to increased worries about subscriber losses as more
consumers downgrade to skinnier bundles of channels.
In the past few months, Sling TV has grown its content
offerings, signing up programmers like the NFL Network,
NBCUniversal and 21st Century Fox, and has begun offering a
$25-a-month tier allowing people to watch multiple streams
simultaneously, an upgrade from its original single-stream service.
Mr. Lynch said recent moves from wireless carriers like Sprint and
T-Mobile to drum up unlimited data plans were another encouraging
factor, given that one-third of Sling TV's unique viewers a week
watch using a mobile phone.
The campaign may also be a move of necessity. Dish doesn't break
out Sling TV customers from its traditional satellite TV
subscribers. But even with the benefit of Sling TV growth, Dish
lost 304,000 subscribers in the first half of this year, compared
with a loss of 46,000 during the same period a year ago.
When Sling TV launched in early 2015, Mr. Lynch said, the
addressable market was 21 million homes -- 16 million cord-nevers
and 5 million people who had cut the cord over the prior few years.
He said both groups are "certainly growing."
"Millennials watch fewer hours of traditional TV a day," Mr.
Lynch said. "We expect that to continue."
Write to Shalini Ramachandran at
shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 30, 2016 09:14 ET (13:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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