One Year In, ShowSeeker Pushes to Unify Linear and Digital Ad Sales
This story was originally featured in CFX: The Magazine‘s latest Top Ops issue, where ShowSeeker was awarded Ad Tech Innovator of the Year. To read the full magazine, check out the digital edition here or visit the Top Ops website.
One year after being acquired by Charter ad sales arm Spectrum Reach, ShowSeeker has set itself apart as a trailblazer in cloud-based campaign management, planning and workflow solutions.
The acquisition crossed the finish line in August 2025, giving ShowSeeker’s software and team a new home. Having the scale of what is now the largest U.S. cable operator behind the ShowSeeker team and its product suite has helped elevate it to a new level of visibility with potential partners, according to VP, Product Strategy Nick Anaclerio.
Central to ShowSeeker’s product strategy is Pilot, its order management system for MVPDs. Over the last 12 months, the company has crafted a roadmap for making Pilot capable of seamlessly managing both linear and digital impressions.
A major step toward that goal was the integration of programmatic advertising into Pilot, allowing media planners to execute converged campaigns from one interface.
That meant revamping the UX to be less linear-centric while also finding additional ways to easily integrate with more third parties.
“We’ve had to slowly over time change those pieces without disrupting our current users,” Anaclerio says.
Also shaping the evolution of Pilot was ShowSeeker’s acquisition of operational improvement firm Innovar Solutions in January 2026. A major driver of that deal was Innovar’s experience in creative management, a process that has historically lived separately from order management due to challenges with legacy traffic and scheduling systems. ShowSeeker’s vision in the coming months is to create one platform for stakeholders to manage the complete ad sales process for linear, streaming and other CTV inventory.
Within the creative management piece, ShowSeeker has developed an automated parser designed to bring in instructions from agency advertisers and normalize data from a number of sources ranging from emails to Excel spreadsheets, shortening the amount of time it takes to push out an order.
ShowSeeker also plans to continue developing Breaks, a commercial break structure product that recently received a complete makeover. Between Pilot and Breaks, users will have the ability to manage their program targets as well as how those ads are laid out across linear and digital.
“There are so many insane rules that exist for different traffic systems, network instances, the way they want those breaks laid out, and we built this entire system to allow maximum flexibility,” Anaclerio says. “We have recently introduced this additional function that allows us to send those same targets and same structures to the streaming services.” Optimum is currently in the process of launching Breaks, he adds.
Looking ahead to 2027, ShowSeeker will be reshaping the buying process for agencies to remove the significant amount of manual entry that it currently requires. That means automating the exchange of new orders, makegoods, revisions and more.
“We want the systems to talk to each other so that there’s a full end-to-end feedback between the buy side and the sell side. It makes a ton of sense for that to be the next evolution,” Anaclerio says. “Some of that is working now. It’s about rolling out and deploying more than anything else.”
Fast Facts
- ShowSeeker was founded in 2003 with an original aim to make it easier for advertisers to sort through the vast amount of content available on cable television.
- With a team in the single digits at its founding, ShowSeeker now has approximately 100 employees including its data science group.
- ShowSeeker Co-Founder Dave Hardy remains at the head of the operation, now serving as a VP/General Manager at Spectrum Reach.