DirectTV has decided to end their ad campaign with Lowe and his funny yet creepy alter-egos after complaints indicated the commercials were misleading. Last weekend, the satellite provider moved on to a new series of commercial spots featuring Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover model Hannah Davis and a talking horse. Oh, yeah! That's entertaining! Don't worry, DirectTV's relationship with Lowe has not been strained nor is it completely over. DirectTV senior vice president of marketing, Jon Gieselman said, "We've talked with Rob about doing something else in the future. He loves the campaign. He's completely gotten into the characters."
Following multiple complaints from cable company Comcast, who might be the worst cable company I've ever had, filed complaints three months ago with the Better Business Bureaus' National Advertising Division, who ruled in Comcast's favor and issued recommendations to DirectTV based on the claims. The omission of Lowe's signature line, "Don't be like this me. Get rid of cable and upgrade to DirectTV," was among the NAD recommedations because it "conveyed a comparative and unsupported superiority message." They also found no evidence that DirectTV had a great signal reliability, shorter customer service wait times and better pictures and sound quality than cable. Yeah? So what? In advertising, the idea is to persuade customers to buy your product with whatever clever copy you need to use. I would think that a company like DirectTV would've done their research before making statements like these anyway. Regardless, Comcast sounds like a bunch of sore losers and might be losing customers since the Rob Lowes campaigns started, so they needed to do something to stop the sudden loss of customers.
DirectTV said in a statement, "We continue to believe that the various Rob Lowe advertisements are so outlandish and exaggerated that no reasonable consumer would believe that the statements being made by the alter-ego characters are comparative or need to be substantiated." I totally agree. If customers are switching their service to DirectTV, it's because of Comcasts' service. It has nothing to do with what alter-ego Rob Lowe says. They are simply just entertaining commercials. After all, the aggressive marketing approach was DirectTV's way to "steal" their competitors' customers and persuade the pay TV consumer to switch over and choose them first. Is that the idea of advertising? To win over the customers? Is that the idea of a compaign war? To win over your competitor's customers?
As a student of the advertising world with a degree in the field, I have to admit that DirectTV's approach was spot on. The commercial campaign was entertaining yet persuasive, which is the one of the main goals when advertising. The ads were working and numbers don't lie. DirectTV saw a spike in subscribers after the ads premiered. Despite the debate of the validity of the ads' messages, the campaign proved to be a successful one. If you ask me, it sounds like Comcast is just pissed because these ads were quirky and better than anything they can come up with. Unfortunately, I am a Comcast customer, but am thinking about flipping because their rates are way too high, their customer service is absolutely horrible and their signal totally sucks! Some of the HD channels don't even work on our TVs. I didn't need Rob Lowe and his alter-ego to tell me that. It's just straight facts from experience. I think Comcast should file a complaint about themselves.
About a month ago, I could not reach Comcast to discuss my bill because it was irregularly too high. They never answered and kept me on hold for about 45 minutes. I then Tweeted them about my disgust because I heard that their social media department was better than their customer service. They didn't answer for 2 weeks. When they finally did respond; it took about a week to fix the billing problem, which still is too high. Again, I don't need Rob Lowe or overachieved in high school Rob Lowe to tell me that Comcast just sucks!
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