Now cable has its own ePort system: National Cable Communications (NCC)–the largest cable TV ad sales firm in the country owned by Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable–and Donovan Data Systems (DDS), a systems and services provider to the ad industry, have collaborated to bring fully electronic order processing to the national spot cable ad marketplace. The partnership enables DDS’ Spot Desktop application and the NCC eBusiness sales system to seamlessly inter-operate.
This new process will allow dramatic increases in the quality of ad campaign execution on cable. From now on, submitting, processing and confirming ad campaigns between NCC, its affiliates and DDS agencies become entirely electronic and paperless.
The open XML standard was developed by DDS and NCC to allow this breakthrough platform to ultimately be available for the entire cable and advertising industries. And early results are proving the vast potential of this effort. In just four weeks since it went live, NCC received and successfully processed over $3 million worth of electronic orders from DDS agencies.
“Integration with DDS’ Spot Desktop application, which completely eliminates paper from the buy/sell process, represents one more way that NCC has made spot cable the easiest and most effective media for ad agencies to execute in all 210 markets across the United States,” said NCC SVP/eBusiness Operations and Research, Nick Garramone.
“The impact of this initiative is enormous. DDS agencies send orders containing more than 10 million spots to NCC every year. We anticipate that all local cable orders sent by DDS buyers will use the new service, representing hundreds of millions of dollars annually,” said Harvey Kent, chief media strategist at DDS.
