Last week I had the good fortune in two separate meals to be talking with one of the top people in the Comcast Spotlight advertising group and the top guy at Time Warner Cable's advertising division. After covering our business of the week, inevitably we got around to talking about video on demand and the future of advertising.

I posed the following question to both gentlemen:

"Do you see a future whereby advertisers buy [insert cable company name] or will they buy X number of impressions with Y frequency and your company will supply a large part of that order?"

This is significant because these two cable giants will have most of the VOD ad inventory in the future. If either of them choose to go it alone, an ad network would be less practical. Also, an ad network could help their telco rivals.

Interestingly, both cable companies identified where their trip-wires might be, but it was not over the need for a VOD Ad Network (or VOD Rep firm) to represent the medium. In other words, if McDonalds bought 400,000 VOD ad impressions, each cable company would not be put off if SBC and Verizon got a portion of that order. They understand that both Comcast and Time Warner will be huge beneficiaries of the buy so why worry about the telco's.

Why? The answer lies in understanding the past. Part of what Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox built to make local cable television advertising ready for transactions was an industry-wide rep firm called NCC. They understood that their best fortunes rested on Madison Avenue buying 'local cable' and not individual cable MSO's. Obviously, their gut tells them that the same thing is required in the VOD world, too.

Good news. This means that those businesses that can provide a real value proposition but need to build a VOD ad network have a shot at doing so.