Telecom companies rolling out IPTV have to market it on a “hyper-local” basis to reach the customers who can receive their service. In some cases, that means going door-to-door, and in others, it can mean guerilla marketing, according to both telco execs and industry analysts.

Telcos are surprisingly nimble at this, said Vince Vittore, program manager with Yankee Group, at a Telecom2008 conference session at the NAB Show. He cited recent ads AT&T ran in Chicago that featured an actor impersonating the late baseball broadcaster Harry Caray, a legendary figure in the Windy City, but not all that well known elsewhere. Those ads were pulled when Caray’s widow complained, but they demonstrated that AT&T isn’t creating cookie-cutter promotional materials.

“It’s not just blast marketing,” Vittore said. “They can’t really go into a major market and do that when 90 percent of the customers can’t get their service. It’s much more person-to-person marketing.”

Verizon’s greatest success has been going door-to-door, said Terry Denson, VP of programming and marketing for Verizon FiOS TV.

“Our most successful marketing has been door-to-door — now is that really the best way in this century? I don’t know,” Denson said. “There really isn’t a silver bullet. What might be valuable is going to be different to each and every one of us in this room. We have them understand that whatever it is they value, we value.”

For right now, that includes “deeply diverse content” that cable lacks the bandwidth to deliver everywhere, Denson said.

Microsoft has major players in the United States and in Europe deploying its Mediaroom IPTV platform, and each company is going about it in a little different way, said Enrique Rodrigeuz-Cavazos, corporate VP of Microsoft TV.

“We’ve seen a wide range, some real versatility in how the service providers are deploying and marketing the service,” he said in an interview at the NAB Show prior to his keynote speech Tuesday. “BT is selling 75 percent at retail channels, its own stories and others, and it has a high number of self-installs. Reliance in India is doing very high-touch interaction with customers.”

Verizon’s Enhanced Communities division, which is now making a major FiOS push in multidwelling units, pulls out all the stops when it goes into a complex, said Eric Cevis, VP of Verizon Enhanced Communities “We send direct mail to them, do door-to-door sales with them, barbeques, beach parties, on-site, in our stores and at the big boxes.”

Verizon also stages an “event-in-a-box,” hooking up one tenant’s service and giving that individual financial incentive to host a party and let neighbors come in and see how FiOS works.

One thing telcos are improving on is listening to the market and their customers, Vittore said. In the past, the communications was pretty much one-way, but “hyper-local” marketing is being based on community needs.

“They have to think about almost guerilla marketing tactics, taking a market block by block,” he said.

Vittore said it’s also important to view IPTV penetration through “a local lens,” measuring how the service is received in the specific areas it’s deployed. “That local market could be a DMA [designated metro area], a city or the 10 blocks in which the service is available,” Vittore said.