NEW YORK -- EchoStar's Dish service is spending millions of dollars on a marketing campaign whose message couldn't be more blunt: Cable TV sucks.
The 30-second spots show objects in the home flying through the air as they're sucked toward the TV screen, which acts as a supermagnet or a black hole.
But it gets nastier than the literal meaning implies: In one spot, a woman having dinner with friends says, "Our TV set sucks," as her cat claws at the rug to keep from being dragged into the living-room TV set.
Calling one aspect of the campaign guerrilla marketing, Jody Martin, senior VP of marketing for EchoStar, said the company has created a Web site called SuckfreeTV.com, which will allow people to call up streaming-video images of destruction on a communitywide scale.
The text accompanying these images reads, "Victim testimonials, graphic photos and video of the destruction caused by TV that sucks."
Martin said EchoStar is counting on the tongue-in-cheek commercials and print ads to take some of the harshness out of the word.
Martin said EchoStar is tying in its campaign to a new logo and on-air look for Dish Network, as well as the new tagline "Better TV for All."
EchoStar declined to disclose the exact amount it's spending on the campaign, but Miller said the outlay is "significant. We're buying broadcast TV, national cable, print, newspaper and radio spots."
Cable operators are probably becoming resigned to the snarky, in-your-face ads created by EchoStar. The previous one compared executives at the major cable companies to enormous pigs devouring troughs of edible garbage, as shown in 30-second spots and still images.
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