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from: Technology Daily

Firms Fork Over Funds For Cable Rate Campaign

By Heather Greenfield
(Friday, May 26)

Telecom companies are spending serious green on advertising in recent weeks alerting Congress and their staffers to what they call a serious cause -- a grassroots campaign for lower cable and broadband rates.

The advertising came amid debates on broader telecom legislation as part of H.R. 5252, a telecom bill offered by House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas, and House Judiciary Committee legislation on net neutrality, H.R. 5417, which received committee approval Thursday. The Senate debated a similar measure Thursday.

Gary Arlen of Arlen Communications estimates the costs of local TV ads at nearly $1 million per week.

"I was struck by how much saturation advertising was going on on the Barton bill," Arlen said.

Arlen released a brief study estimating that the U.S. Telecom Association spent $250,000 a week over six weeks. USTA represents the majority of the Bell telecommunications firms. Arlen believes AT&T spent $600,000 per week. TV4US, which bills itself as a grassroots coalition funded by a half-dozen corporate sponsors, spent $75,000 per week. One of its sponsors is AT&T.

"These guys are intelligently making their media buys next to newscasts or talk shows," Arlen said.

U.S. Telecom, AT&T and TV4US all declined to confirm or deny the numbers.

"We're not going to confirm that. It's definitely a substantial sum and it's worth every penny," said Tom Amontree, senior vice president of strategic communications for U.S. Telecom. He said the campaign to allow telecom companies to compete with cable companies for TV service has been going on for three years and the catchy ads have been effective.

The ads against net neutrality are more recent. These efforts are targeting the proposed legislation that would block telecom and cable companies from charging preferred customers higher rates for high-speed Internet access.

The ads can be seen anywhere a congressional staffer is likely to be -- the metro transit system, near the Delta and U.S. Air shuttles at the airport, the Washington Post, and Roll Call.

The print ads refer people to sites like www.handsofftheinternet.com, www.thefuturefaster.com, and a savvy video ad at www.dontregulate.org.

The telecom firms also have bought ads on the blogs run by net neutrality proponents.

Bloggers like Crooks and Liars, Seeing the Forest, MyDD and Eschaton allowed the ad -- and attacked it.

Duncan Black wrote on Eschaton he was happy to take their money but told readers they could "ignore the telco ad to the right."

The proponents of net neutrality have giants like Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo on their side, but finding ads for them has been a scavenger hunt.

Craig Aaron, spokesman for Save the Internet, said his group is considering print ads. In the meantime, they do have some no-budget videos made by supporters available at their Web site and on YouTube.com.

"The reason we haven't advertised is that thus far we have run a grassroots campaign. We haven't taken any corporate money from any companies that have a stake in this," Aaron said. "We have spent $10,000 total. We estimate out opponents are spending something like $3 million a week."