John Linton's Personal Musings

John Linton

(the first 'sea change' was starting to hire a sales force to sell Ethernet and SHDSL connections to medium/large businesses which is now in it's third month with a long way to go - we are interviewing to hire another four trainees later this week.).

Since we started offering broad band services in January 2004 to residential users we have never spent one cent on advertising or any other sort of promotion. This 'policy' has not impeded our month on month growth every month for the past 65 months and has allowed us to invest whatever amount of money other start up communications companies may set aside for 'promotion' into switches, routers and bandwidth and other infrastructures. It has been a sensible, albeit very conservative, policy for the whole of that time. It is now something we are going to change.

Why are we going to change? I could write that it is a carefully thought out long term considered strategy. But, that would be untrue. The short answer is that I, as the person responsible for developing our sales revenues (and profits), I haven't got a clue as to how to use our current methodologies to more rapidly make Exetel's name and the Exetel versions of the Optus HSPA service widely enough known in the areas we want to sell HSPA to end users (or any other area for that matter) to meet the ambitious targets we believe could be achievable. So, as Conan Doyle once, almost, said, "once you've removed all other options, advertising no matter how much you dislike and distrust it, becomes your only method of approach".

And so it came to pass - something I never expected to do at Exetel. We accepted a proposal yesterday from the fourth 'agency' we had asked to advise us on promoting HSPA services in rural and regional country areas of Australia and have accepted their recommendation to use television advertising in selected areas from some time in early July 2009 until some time in early December 2009. I'm not a fan of hyperbole or any of the other extravagances of the 'media world' but I had some reasonable empathy with the structure and content of the plan presented to us. I have no idea whether the proposal will actually work but then I had no idea whether Exetel would 'really work' when we went in to the communications business in 2004. While I abhor any type of waste we can 'afford' to 'lose' our planned expenditure on advertising without in any way damaging our business as it will be paid for out of the current financial year's profits which would other wise only be wasted on dividends for the shareholders less payments to the ATO - in itself not a sensible use of hard earned and still small profits.

We had hoped to begin an 'advertising campaign' for HSPA in December 2008 but continual slippages of almost every aspect of getting the service available and then understanding its limitations (and how to overcome some of them) plus the endless delays in getting properly priced Yagis and HSPA modems (let alone the hoped for 'magic box') have all 'conspired' to make any date we picked impossible to meet - and that may well still continue to be the case. With the Yagi's "almost on the proverbial boat" and the lower cost modems "almost there" we have decided, very regretfully, to remove the 'magic box' from the initial offers and fly with what we have....which is still quite a bit better than what I see of the other 'me too' HSPA offers in today's market.

My concerns about the whole project remain the same - does the Optus coverage provide a decent performance or have they over sold and under provisioned their HSPA network as they seem to make a habit of over the past 20 years of deploying new technologies? The other major concern is will some of Optus other wholesale customers make a dog's breakfast of country markets just as they have city markets with their "free!" "free!" "free!" stupidities (a la Dodo) and the strange/poor performance of their own retail and Virgin offerings (which whenever I do a benchmark of an Optus Retail/Virgin HSPA service side by side with an Exetel/Optus HSPA service the Exetel/Optus service is ALWAYS almost twice as fast. However, I am always optimistic about these things although we will carefully select the coverage areas.

There will still remain the concerns about the on time receipt of the antennae and the low cost modems and the finalisation of the plan prices for the country promotion but the first two we can do nothing about and the third is only a matter of being 'brave' enough. There is the small matter of developing the new web site for "Exetel Country" - I guess most people are too young to confuse that new web site name with "Marlborough Country" - though perhaps we could add similar 'Western' music to the front page? It will be interesting to see what sort of job we can do of that in some new and very different ways.

So, using advertising for the first time in over fifteen years is going to be a real challenge for me as I have no knowledge of the logistics that are needed to make such a 'campaign' effective. While I liked the theoretical impact of the ad we were shown (via 'story board'), I was surprised at how completely the selling message was put over, and understood the logic of how the 'contacts' would work I am still unsure of how to implement the detail. Then again that describes most of my life to date so I'm vaguely looking forward to getting the detail right in the limited time that's available rather than being overwhelmed at the thought of cramming another major project (on top of the Sri Lankan ongoing development, building the corporate sales force, the premises move as well as the total re-vamp of our ADSL service offerings and promotion methods) into the next four weeks.

Perhaps I'm being too 'dramatic' and these projects and other tasks are just symptomatic of a slightly busier period which is normal at the end/start of each financial year.

Maybe it's just old age?