EchoStar Communications Corp.’s Dish Network service launched a nationwide anti-cable campaign Monday, likening cable service to a pig that won’t stop eating its customers’ money.
EchoStar spokesman Marc Lumpkin said the campaign -- which includes print and television ads -- launched Monday on several major cable and local broadcast-television networks.
A full-page ad ran in Denver editions of USA Today Monday calling for consumers to "Stop Feeding the Cable Pig," and it will run in other issues of the paper nationwide the rest of the week.
A Web site was also launched Monday (www.stopfeedingthepig.com).
"Basically, cable is greedy -- cable’s been raising their rates five times faster than the rate of inflation -- and so they’re a pig," Lumpkin said.
He added that the TV spots depict a pig running through a house, stealing all of the homeowner’s money, jewelry and even the dog’s food. The family finally calls up a Dish representative to switch to satellite service because cable is eating them out of house and home.
While the spots appear to be a direct response to the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing’s "OnlyCableCan" campaign -- which also launched Monday and is designed to tout high-speed data, HDTV and video-on-demand services -- Lumpkin said the opposite is true: EchoStar has been working on these spots for months.
"I think they heard about what we were doing and they did theirs in response, because theirs doesn’t have much meat to it, no pun intended," he added.
