NCC, DirecTV Tout Benefits of New Rep Deal

Firm Will Handle National Spot Ad Sales for Regional Sports Nets

By Linda Moss and Mike Reynolds -- Multichannel News, 8/18/2008 5:17:00 PM

DirecTV and the rep firm NCC, owned by three cable operators, claimed Monday that their partnership will be a win-win for both sides, even though the satellite provider and MSOs compete for video customers.

NCC—a venture of Comcast Cable, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable—and DirecTV announced that the rep firm will assume national spot sales for the satellite provider for the regional sports networks it offers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Also part of that deal, NCC will integrate the regional sports network feeds currently offered to DirecTV customers into cable-advertising interconnects in those nine U.S. markets.

Currently, DirecTV uses local avails on the regional sports channels it carries to either run marketing spots, or lets the sports nets cover those local avails with direct-response ads, according to Bob Riordan, DirecTV’s senior vice president of advertising sales.

“It’s (local ad inventory on RSNS) been an asset that we haven’t utilized,” he said. “With NCC’s several hundred sales people, and their organization on the ground and the assets they have, we’re going to be able to monetize this inventory.”       

NCC president Greg Schaefer said that the partnership will be a benefit to local and national advertisers.

“Satellite has been viewed as always a network buy because they didn’t have the ability to break down the signal to individual marketplaces. Obviously, this is a first step in that direction,” Schaefer said. “And they (DirecTV) didn’t have a local sales force to support the spot dollars that come into individual markets,”

Despite the competition between DirecTV and cable, officials said that both NCC and the satellite provider can reap benefits by teaming up on the spot ad-sales side.

“This is a strategic partnership that really benefits both parties,” Schaefer said. “As for DirecTV, what this does is give them access to a sales force around the country…as well as over 250 sales executives selling for them on a local basis, just through NCC, not to mention the fact that we’re now putting a sales force in all our markets on the street for them to sell to regional advertisers that want to buy locally.”

Said Riordan, “They are competitors on a certain level, but also there are ways where it makes perfect business sense by doing things with them. As they do us, we have a great deal of respect for our competitors. They’re good, smart business people. This is a way for the two platforms to work together on a business sense. It’s just a good opportunity.”

Although DirecTV carries 29 regional sports channels, the NCC deal will only kick off with some of them, ramping up to include others in the future.

“We’re going to roll out first Chicago, and then the goal is to roll out the other markets for opening day of Major League Baseball next season,” Riordan said. “We are building this to scalability.”

The idea is to beta test in Chicago, with the interconnect ad-insertion in place and available for the NBA and NHL seasons, according to Riordan.

As for the choice of the first nine markets, Schaefer said, “These are the ones that he said we can do local ad-insertion now. The reality was the plan was to start in the major markets and then roll it out from there. And these were executable immediately, so we figured let’s start here and then we will expand the business as we have some success.”

For the most part, NCC will work with regional sports networks in markets where Comcast is the predominant cable operator: FSN South and SportsSouth in Atlanta; CSN New England and NESN in Boston; CSN Chicago in the Windy City environs; Altitude and FSN Rocky Mountain in Denver; FSN Detroit in the Motor City DMA; FSN Southwest in Houston; and FSN Bay Area in San Francisco.

Time Warner Cable in Dallas with FSN Southwest and Adlink, the Los Angeles interconnect, with FSN Prime Ticket and FSN West, are also involved with the NCC gambit.

“NCC has always been in the eyeball business, and it’s been our obligation to aggregate all of these audiences on behalf of the advertising agencies, and to give them a one-stop shop for buying the local marketplace,” Schaefer said. “So the beauty of this is maybe we’re competitors, but the reality is it’s an additive thing and it just gives cable a better-deserved slice of the pie versus the broadcast entities in the local marketplaces.”