• by Paul Gough , June 5, 2003

The nation's largest spot-cable rep firm's road show pulled into New York City on Thursday morning, hoping to entice planners and buyers to shift money from broadcast into cable.

National Cable Communications is owned by three big MSOs with deals with others to deliver about 98% of the country's ad-insertable cable households. NCC has grown in the past nine months to more than 500 employees, offices around the country and interconnects that deliver 65 of the nation's top 100 markets for simpler spot cable buying.

NCC's message: Spot cable is more important to buy than ever to find the points that are missing in today's broadcast-heavy media plans. And spot cable is easier to buy than ever with a growing number of interconnects (75 projected by year's end) and a transactional platform that uses the Internet and any Web browser to eliminate the cost, paperwork and hassle that NCC acknowledges used to mark a spot cable buy.

Thursday's upfront-style presentation was aimed at about 400 media buyers that NCC President Tom Olson said represented about a third of the company's billings. He and other NCC executives said the big MSOs (Comcast, Cox and Time Warner) looked at the way spot cable had been sold in the past and realized that it relied too heavily on the way broadcast had been doing business for decades. NCC, along with MSOs and other partners, forged cooperation, standard practices and a technology base that Olson said knocked down the barriers. With those barriers lifted, the NCC is using events like Thursday and presentation by its sales force to lift its sales even higher.

"I hope when you look at NCC, I hope you see a one-stop resource," Olson said.

In what has become a familiar manta among cable advertising circles, NCC positioned cable as a growing source of quality programming and a segment (ad-supported cable) that outperformed the seven broadcast networks in every day part. NCC said spot cable can target by demographic, ethnicity, product usage and geography. NCC data said that in 2002, 90 of the top 100 advertisers were using spot cable. Yet spot cable only claims about 6% of total spot TV spending, with the rest going to broadcast.

Olson said that spot-cable sellers feel hamstrung when a media plan specifies a limited number of channels that have to be bought. The reality, Olson said, was that spot cable only gets to sell about two minutes an hour for those networks. But expand the net to the 33 ad-insertable networks that are on the typical cable system, and Olson said spot cable can compete with broadcast buys. NCC said that spot cable can reduce the amount of points required to reach an advertiser's market objectives by up to 40% when its bought along with broadcast television. Olson said that if agencies use the least-performing parts of a broadcast media plan to buy spot cable, "You'll get more gross ratings points and you'll do it for the same or even a few dollars less."