Identifying Opportunities for Expanding Digital Cable TV

• Activity Number: 280
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and Marketing
• Author(s): Susan Devlin*+ and Carol Cunningham and Jason Coppola
• Affiliation(s): The Artemis Group, LLC and A&E Television Networks and The Artemis Group, LLC
• Keywords: case study from cable TV ; classification tree application ; survey research ; marketing research

Abstract

To support aggressive growth and profitability targets for Digital TV, three of the top ten US cable TV providers joined with A&E Television Networks (AETN) to gather subscriber feedback to guide marketing, carriage, and programming decisions. Before presenting the results, several managerial and analytical challenges--which gave direction to the survey design, analysis, and reporting--are discussed. Of primary concern was the need to present and protect company-specific data, yet leverage all data to increase accuracy and scale of analysis allowed by the composite view. In addition, communication of multivariate analysis needed to be simple but compelling, for presentation among the creative programming groups with little previous exposure to this type of analysis. With a focus on the opportunities and challenges identified by the study, sample analytical methods and displays are used to demonstrate how key observations were identified and supported: 1.) graphical summaries of programming interests to develop preliminary genre and network rankings; 2.) classification trees to characterize likelihood to drop digital; 3.) SVD to identify promotion and programming format preferences.