NCC Media rebrands as it moves into audience-based addressability
A television advertising cohort that includes US cable operators Comcast, Charter and Cox is retooling its data offering to help advertisers reach a more granular set of viewers across traditional TV.
NCC Media changes its name, infuses more data into addressable TV
The members of the group, NCC Media, will be pooling their viewership data together to let advertisers make audience-based buys across their cable TV footprint. For example, an auto advertiser could specifically target someone looking to buy a luxury car, going beyond location-based targeting.
Along with the new offering comes a new name. NCC is rebranding to Ampersand to reflect “the company’s mission of unifying the TV advertising ecosystem across all screens, inventory and audiences.” The group was founded in 1981.
“The Ampersand name and the new audience products represent both a nod to our past and our vision for a succesful TV future,” said Nicolle Pangis, chief executive officer of Ampersand, “in which the industry rallies around a shared approach for connecting brands to audiences across the entirety of the viewing experience.”
Cable operators typically take two minutes of ad time per hour from their TV programmers to sell addressable ads. Now, Ampersand will be helping those programmers reserve a chunk of their national linear and video on demand inventory as addressable ads.
The newly-named ad group is also bolstering its partnership with TV measurement consortium OpenAP, which kicked off this June.
Advertisers will now be able to create audience definitions, such as auto intenders or high-income households, with OpenAP, and then share that information with Ampersand to use in an addressable TV campaign.
“This collaboration between Ampersand and OpenAP seeks to further promote consistent, standards-based approaches to data translations necessary for local and national investment groups, with the goal of making it easier for advertisers to use advanced capabilities across all TV inventory,” Ampersand said.
Ampersand is infusing more data into its products as TV buyers question the efficacy of such consortiums.
David Campanelli, executive vice-president and co-chief investment officer at Horizon Media, recently said media buyers are hoping for more input when publishers come together to develop industry standards.
“Too often what happens is a concept is developed and it works for the sales side and then it gets presented out to the buying community,” said Campanelli, “and a lot of the times the buying community is like, ‘This may have solved a problem I didn't have.’”