Location is Everything.

Consolidation was supposed to give operators a crack at mass marketing. So why are they still using direct mail and sponsoring community fairs?

AT&T Broadband has a secret marketing weapon in the San Francisco area: cricket.

Marketers at the MSO, which has been using community events to push the local systems, noticed that an increasing number of their customers in the Bay Area are speakers of Hindi who hail from the Indian subcontinent. So AT&T recently sponsored a Hindi film festival and offers programming from ZTV, a Hindi language channel from International Channel's slate of programming. The company also heavily promoted an upcoming cricket match on ZTV.

"Research told us that cricket is highly popular with the expatriate Hindu population, which has exploded in the area in the last couple of years," says AT&T spokesman Andrew Johnson.

"Community events have provided us with a tremendous boost," he adds. "The old-fashioned events are a great introduction into the community."

AT&T's local approach is somewhat unexpected, given that consolidation was supposed to change the ways that operators marketed their services. After all, for years operators rationalized their clustering strategy by saying they could finally sell their services across an entire DMA using mass-media tactics that were formerly forbidden by exorbitant costs and inefficient results. Now, most large markets are consolidated, and MSOs can finally take advantage of things like radio, TV and newspaper ads to hawk their wares.

But many operators are finding that some …