NCC Media, an advanced advertising joint venture from Comcast, Charter and Cox, has changed its name to Ampersand.
The company announced the name change at the Advertising Week Conference in New York, where it’s also unveiling new features and services for its ad platform.
The company said it has unified aggregated viewership data insights across the Charter, Comcast and Cox combined footprint of nearly 40 million households to support the design of audience-based planning and buying for the TV marketplace. This will allow marketers to plan, buy and optimize their TV investments against desired audience segments.
Ampersand is also deepening its partnership with OpenAP, a different advertising joint venture between Fox, NBCUniversal and Viacom. Now, advertisers who work with Ampersand's Client Partnerships team will be able to directly share audience definitions created in OpenAP with Ampersand for expression and use in local advanced advertising.
RELATED: NCC Media teams with OpenAP for audience-segmented ad buying
Ampersand is also launching a National TV Extension (NTVX) platform to complement network TV buys by driving incremental reach and frequency against under-exposed brand audiences aggregated across Ampersand’s more than 85 million represented cable household footprint.
Finally, Ampersand announced that it will serve as part of the central hub for network-enabled addressable, on behalf of Charter, Comcast, and Cox. Working in partnership with Canoe, Ampersand will provide TV programmers with addressable capabilities on their national linear and VOD TV inventory. Ampersand will also offer programmers several options for representing the sale of their addressable inventory
“Thirty years ago, NCC showed the TV world the power of working together, unifying the fragmented cable TV ad market within a single, open platform for the benefit of advertisers, agencies and MVPDs,” said Nicolle Pangis, CEO of Ampersand, in a statement. “The Ampersand name and the new audience products represent both a nod to our past and our vision for a successful TV future in which the industry rallies around a shared approach for connecting brands to audiences across the entirety of the viewing experience.”