Scheduling Commercials on Broadcast Television

Abstract

Television networks sell advertising slots to clients by the shows on which the commercials air. The networks determine the exact location in the show that a commercial will air at a later stage, usually close to the airdate of the show. There are several criteria the networks must meet in scheduling commercials in a show. The schedule should be such that no two commercials promoting competing products from different clients air in the same break. The audience ratings tend to be higher at the start and end of a commercial break than during the middle of the break. Therefore, advertisers generally prefer the first and last positions in a commercial segment, to those in the middle. TV networks normally promise their clients an equitable rotation of commercials among the positions within a commercial break. The scheduling of commercials on shows is traditionally done manually and is a cumbersome, time-intensive, and error-prone process. We formulate the commercial scheduling problem as an integer program and develop near-optimal heuristics for automatically scheduling the commercials to meet all the requirements. We implemented our algorithm at the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). In addition to reducing sales personnel costs by automating the scheduling of commercials, our work has increased customer satisfaction by minimizing errors in meeting customer requirements.

Inequity averse optimization in operational research

“…Bollapragada and Garbiras (2004) propose a mathematical model for this problem, in which balance concerns over clients are also considered. Similarly, Karsu and Morton (2014) propose a bicriteria modeling framework that considers both efficiency and balance concerns in resource allocation problems.…”

“…For each flight a worst-case FSFS delay is calculated and each interval delay beyond this worst-case FSFS delay is penalized by an exponentially increasing amount. Similarly, Bollapragada and Garbiras (2004) minimize a piecewise linear penalty function of deviations from goals. In an access control policy design problem, Zhang and Shen (2010) incorporate spatial equity into the model by using the weighted square sum of the average delay over different entry points.…”

Allocation algorithms for personal TV advertisements

“…The scheduling itself is also an NP-Hard problem which has been addressed in many papers, e.g. [5,11]. The scheduling problem is not in the scope of this paper, and since we do not consider any specific scheduler or any schedule constraints we assume a random scheduler.…”

A Decision Support System for Planning Promotion Time Slots

“…The literature dealing specifically with TV breaks scheduling problem is sparse and deals only with commercial breaks. Bollapragada et al [2,3] studied the commercial scheduling problem to generate sales plans to meet the requirement of a single advertiser. The problem was modelled as an integer program and solved sequentially for each advertiser with an objective to make the least use of premium inventory.…”

“…The problem was modelled as an integer program and solved sequentially for each advertiser with an objective to make the least use of premium inventory. Bollapragada [4] then studied the problem on scheduling commercials over a specific period so that the airing of the same commercials are spread as evenly as possible. Jones [6] introduced the advertising allocation problem as an example to design incompletely specified combinatorial auctions where potentially hundreds of advertisers can submit combinatorial bids for the airing of their commercials in the advertising slots.…”