Ampersand – a TV ad sales and tech company owned by Charter, Comcast and Cox – today launched a new audience-based ad planning, buying and measurement platform.
The AND Platform provides marketers with reach across 85 million households, 120 cable networks and more than 55% of all addressable households through the combined ad inventory of its owners. The platform will provide an interface for both local and national TV buying.
Ampersand (which was previously called NCC Media) is promising that advertisers will be able to define audiences beyond traditional age and gender demos, and build custom audience segments using the company’s anonymized and aggregated viewing insights from nearly 40 million households. Later this year, advertisers will be able to integrate their own first party data sets into the platform and Ampersand will release an API so clients can integrate AND into their own planning systems.
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The AND Platform's measurement tools will let advertisers and marketers monitor campaign reach and frequency in-flight as well as performance against intended business outcomes. Measurement capabilities are powered by Ampersand partners TVSquared, Data+Math, Acxiom and more.
"With the launch of The AND platform, we're bringing a new level of capability and scale to advanced TV advertising, providing agencies and marketers with a flexible and open solution for reaching audiences across the entirety of the TV viewing experience," said Nicolle Pangis, CEO of Ampersand, in a statement. "This is the most substantive advancement to date in our ongoing mission to unify the advanced TV ad ecosystem across all screens, inventory and audiences."
The launch of Ampersand’s AND Platform arrives shortly after others in the industry like NBCUniversal and OpenAP – an advanced advertising joint venture run by Fox, Viacom and NBCUniversal – launched similar cross-platform, audience-based ad platforms.