National CineMedia is expanding its definition of where a captive audience can be found. The largest cinema advertising network in the United States has agreed to acquire Captivate for USD $275 million, extending its reach from movie theatres into office buildings, elevators and residential properties across North America.

Captivate operates more than 26,000 digital video screens in over 11,000 office and residential buildings across more than 170 designated market areas. Combined with NCM’s roughly 22,000 theatre and lobby screens, the deal would give the company a network of more than 48,000 screens across 185 markets, including all of the top 100.

The logic is not simply diversification away from movie theatres. NCM can potentially offer advertisers something considerably broader: access to affluent professionals at work, consumers where they live and the younger, diverse audiences that continue to make cinemas particularly attractive to brands. Captivate also opens the door to business-to-business advertising categories such as financial services and enterprise technology that historically have had little reason to buy cinema inventory.

Just as importantly, those Captivate advertisers can now be sold movie theatre audiences as part of the same campaign. In other words, NCM may be expanding beyond cinema partly as a way of making cinema advertising easier to buy.

The acquisition comes as NCM’s core business is already improving alongside the domestic box office. Second-quarter revenue increased 12.7% year-over-year to USD $58.4 million, while adjusted OIBDA rose to USD $2.1 million from USD $700,000 a year earlier.

The expansion does come with some financial weight. NCM plans to fund the transaction with USD $275 million in new term debt and has paused its dividend and share repurchase programs as it expects leverage to reach approximately 3.9 times at closing.