DISH and NCC Media Join Forces, Greatly Extending Consumer Reach and Targeting for National and Local Television Advertisers

Aug. 27, 2013

DISH and NCC Media announced the formation of a groundbreaking partnership that expands upon the cable industry's collaborative I+ initiative which links cable, satellite and telco companies' ad inventory. The agreement will combine ad impressions in over 3 million additional DISH subscriber homes with those of NCC owners Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable in 25 of the largest US markets, delivering tremendous advantages to advertisers - greater local reach and penetration against targeted consumers in the best programming on television.

The arrangement crowns a decade- long effort by NCC and its owners to consolidate the advertising reach of all US MVPD's, brings DISH to the local advertising market for the first time and creates a golden opportunity for MVPD's to grow ad revenues together. DISH's newly developed targeted ad system will be integrated with existing local market cable advertising platforms, called 'interconnects', greatly increasing an ad campaign's coverage. The platform is available to advertisers via NCC's sales force in 16 offices across the country, and to local marketers via the local interconnect sales teams of Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable.

"This partnership with NCC Media is an exciting new chapter, leveraging DISH's market-leading technology for delivering targeted television advertising," says Warren Schlichting, Senior Vice President, Ad Sales at DISH. "By gaining access to the country's third largest pay-TV provider's customers, local and national spot TV advertisers can now speak with millions of consumers who were simply not accessible before."

DISH's addressable technology enables zone-targeted ads to be stored within DVR enabled set top boxes, allowing for the insertion of ads in local breaks across multiple cable networks. The DISH component of the existing I+ platform will be operational in late 2013.

"Our mission has always been to make our medium easier to buy, while reducing complexity for our ad agency partners, " added NCC Media President & CEO Greg Schaefer  "This collaboration with DISH was done because it's what the advertising market demanded; to deliver more quality consumer GRP's in cable programming in local markets. And it does, in a big way."

As viewership continues to move from broadcast to cable programming, advertisers now have one-stop access via NCC Media to place ads that reach America's best local market consumer households on a wide selection of cable networks. NCC Media's portfolio of offerings to advertisers now reaches virtually every ad- insertable TV household and multichannel video programming distributor in all 210 US markets.

The operation is serviced by NCC's vaunted E-business applications, which will seamlessly integrate the new DISH subscribers into the buying and stewardship systems used by virtually every US ad agency. This integration means there will be no additional effort needed for media planners and buyers to place local ads in DISH homes via NCC or their local cable interconnect partners.

The partnership between NCC Media and DISH has its roots in a proven, successful collaboration between the two organizations in the sale of advertising in regional sports networks. This working relationship has given NCC Media hands-on experience with DISH's engineering, operations and sales departments, and this ability will be fully utilized going forward.