Hoping to grab an even bigger slice of the region's surging small-business market, Southern California cable-television companies are rolling out new products and prices in a bid to lure ever smaller mom-and-pop advertisers.
Over the last year, at least four of the area's largest cable players have broken apart formerly sprawling ad zones, a move that has made rates more affordable for local businesses, which can now squeeze their message into areas as compact as 10 square miles.
This less-is-more strategy is attracting the likes of J.R. Stanley, a San Clemente auto-repair shop owner who used to spend $1,000 a month on phone book advertising alone. Last month, he began channeling that same ad budget into 30-second cable spots in a slimmed-down region created by the local sales arm of Atlanta-based Cox Communications.
Ads touting Stanley's performance-enhancing tuneups now run during breaks in Dodger and Angel games that are televised in a 15-mile crescent of communities from Laguna Hills to the San Diego County line. The streamlined zone allows Stanley to target his core clientele of 18- to 40-year-old men in roughly 90,000 households, all of them within an easy drive of his shop.
Since their debut, the spots have attracted at least 10 new customers looking to spend as much as $500 each to soup up their cars, trucks and SUVs, Stanley said.
"I think the TV thing is probably the best thing we've ever done," he says, vowing to dump his phone book advertising for good.
Cable industry observers predict such "cell division" in advertising zones will only accelerate as cable companies increasingly turn to small businesses to help drive ad revenue. Last year, single-location retailers and mom-and-pop services accounted for roughly two-thirds of all cable-TV spots shown in greater Los Angeles. Those commercials generated $69 million in ad revenue, a 14% jump over the previous year, according to Adlink, which sells national advertising to cable systems in the five-county region.
Nationwide, local cable advertising has been rising steadily for the last 10 years, reaching $2.5 billion in ad sales in 1998. The figure accounted for nearly one-quarter of last year's $10.4 billion total cable ad revenue.
"People who never used to buy cable are now buying cable," said Vicki Lins, Adlink's marketing director.
