About a month ago, when everyone was off on their Christmas hols, Multichoice casually mentioned that their DSTV service had just signed up its one millionth subscriber.
Not only that but I have been told that this past year has been the most successful in DSTV's ten year history and also that by the end of December all its targets had been met - three months before its March 31 financial year-end.
BOLD MARKETING
All of this was helped, one suspects, by the launch of the mini-bouquet, DSTV compact, which gave all those penniless people hankering after a wider choice of TV viewing a far more affordable entry into pay-TV. In terms of product, the Multchoice marketing approach has been bold and in your face but with conservative projections.
For example, after only a month or two since the launch of the PVR Decoder, sales have already outstripped projections. It's been the same all along the line. M-Net's first million subscribers also came up far quicker than projected.
PROMAX AWARDS
It is not a bad marketing policy to have as long, of course, as your lower projections are also profitable projections, which DSTV's have always been. To add another feather to its cap, DSTV also won 12 Promax Awards at the Global Conference in New York recently.
From a marketing point of view DSTV's success has not come as any sort of surprise. For years now TV bosses have been preaching that viewers don't watch channels, they watch programmes. But the trouble is, of all the TV networks in South Africa DSTV seems to be the only one that practices what it preaches.
The others keep spending fortunes on marketing channels instead of ploughing all their adspend into promoting programmes.
Certainly the TV channels have the edge on their print counterparts when it comes to marketing. Sure, they have a lot more money which newspapers and magazine simply don't have. But then marketing is also all about persuading the powers that be to provide the budgets. So far, the TV industry seems to have been a lot more persuasive than newspaper management.
