Fifteen years ago, Jill Campbell was named one of the most influential women in Southern Nevada by a local business publication. Now, she’s one of the most influential women in the communications industry.
The Las Vegas native, who graduated from Bishop Gorman High School and UNLV, is executive vice president and chief operating officer of Cox Communications. She has been with the company for 33 years.
Early in Campbell’s career, a boss encouraged her to get a master’s degree in business administration and enter the operations side of the industry, where there were few women. Years later, she returned to Las Vegas to run Cox’s cable system before being
promoted to the company’s corporate office in Atlanta.
“It was wonderful to get to come back and see how much the community had grown, and the university itself was phenomenal,” Campbell said. “When I started, there were no dorms; it was a commuter school. Now, it’s such a fantastic university. It makes me really proud to have graduated from there.”
Campbell now oversees Cox’s residential business and supervises regional managers who handle community, employee and government relations. Her part of the operations includes about 20,000 employees covering customer service, field work, marketing, sales and public affairs.
She and other senior Cox executives came to Nevada this month for Get Started Las Vegas, an event similar to the television show “Shark Tank,” in which entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of judges.
Campbell chatted with VEGAS INC about the communications industry, a la carte television and more.
How have things changed for women in the workplace since you entered the operations sector?
On the operations side, there still are not a lot of women, unfortunately. We continue to find them managing cable systems; we’re seeing a lot of growth in marketing, new business products, even finance. But in terms of general management, my level, they’re still very few and far between. Where we see them advancing is on the network and programming side, so you’ll see a lot of women who run networks. I think that’s pretty exciting.
What kind of advancements in technology do you see coming for the industry?
It’s moving so rapidly, I sort of stay tuned every minute and open the paper to see what’s next. What’s exciting to me is 1-gigabit residential Internet service. We announced in Las Vegas that we were bringing it to the market, and now we’re actually doing that nationally.
At some point in the coming year to 18 months, there will be things like cloud DVR. I think you’ll see a much more robust video-on-demand platform, so you’ll have the ability to order a lot more movies.
Then you think about broadband speeds. You’re going to see the industry providing a lot more capability in speed than we have in the past, and I think that’s going to be great.
You’re seeing a lot of people try what’s called “over the top,” which is through the Internet — like a Netflix — trying a lot more niche programming to try to reach different groups, such as millennials. I think you’re going to see a lot more of those pop up.
We are looking into lots of new businesses. We just did a deal with the Cleveland Clinic involving health care kiosks in businesses, so you don’t have to go to Quest laboratories or the like. You can just go in your office, swipe your insurance card and visit with a doctor. That has endless possibilities for the industry when you think about connected homes and being able to do health care monitoring from home.
I think the health care world is just going to explode for the industry, as well as connected homes, not just with home security but with home automation. More and more devices will be controlled by an app.
Will we ever see a la carte pay television industrywide?
It really is complicated. Think about the paid TV programmers, the NBCs of the world. They’ve been paid by those cable operators, like Cox, as well as advertisers. That has been their bread and butter. And then we pass those costs along to the consumer. I kind of liken us to the post office; we just deliver the mail. We aren’t creating the mail.
So at the end of the day, they are used to those revenue streams. If you go a la carte, ESPN is not going to say to the consumer, “You just buy ESPN without all of the other products.” Nor are they going to let us do that — let’s say we want to provide it over the top — because then they lose that packaged revenue stream.
Then they sell ESPN at, what, $20 a customer? Does that make up for the millions that currently take it whether they want ESPN or not?
Try to explain that to the consumer, though. It’s very difficult. Logically, you say, “Well, why can’t I just buy what I want?” Well, the business model doesn’t work. It falls apart. When you start to pull them apart, and then they have to provide all of the back-office support, all of the sports rights or other programming rights, talent fees, etc., it makes it very difficult if you don’t have scale to provide those services.
How did Get Started Las Vegas come about?
We’ve had about 16 of these overall. It really started as a brainchild of somebody who was in our corporate public affairs group.
They said, “Wouldn’t it be great, in each of our communities, to look at people who wanted to start new businesses and then have a panel of judges, much like ‘Shark Tank,’ to reward them with seed money and a gift pack?” Also, so they have this entry into all of the other businesses in town, to get to know them.
From there, we worked with our Cox business partners. They invite businesses in the community, chamber folks and those who want to know more about what these entrepreneurs are coming up with.
For us, cable really started as an entrepreneurial business. It was just some guys who were trying to get television signals to small properties; they put in their own money. That’s really at the root of who we are and what we do.
Secondly, we’re very committed to being involved in the communities we serve. We have local markets, and we believe in giving back to those markets, and we felt like this was a great way to do that for people in our communities. So we’ve been doing them all over the country.
What is the best business advice you’ve received?
I think it was quite some time ago in my career, and that was: You hire really good people, set expectations, check in, and get out of their way. If you have really good people, they make you look better and you have less to do. That has always proven itself out for me.
That kind of coupled with: When you know you’ve got somebody who’s not making it, it’s so painful to continue on with them for you, them and the company. Once you make that call and move on, and you get somebody who’s really good in that role, it’s like night and day. You never go, “Well, I wish I would have held on to that person longer.”
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
One of the things I think is so amazing in this market — and we’ve got it in other markets — is Cox Charities. It’s employees giving to the community, and they get to pick what organizations they want to support. They’ve given more than $1 million to organizations in the Las Vegas community. It just speaks volumes about the culture of Cox and how the employees feel about the community they live in.