Consider TNT, TBS and the various superstations. All offer more sports programming and movies. When sports are on, it is male driven. When movies are on, it is female driven. The basic adage of advertising is that there are two things that make successful advertising.
Frequency is the art of frequenting the specific buying target many, many times.
Cable allows retailers to frequent or tell their specific audience their message over and over again for a very low cost. That is half the battle. With cable you can also, in many markets, geographically pinpoint your message while not wasting your message on consumers in areas that will not respond to your message. The other reason that retailers have grown to love cable is that it works. They simply cannot get to a level of frequency that works any other way.