Scheduling Commercials on Broadcast Television

Srinivas Bollapragada () and Marc Garbiras ()
Additional contact information
Srinivas Bollapragada: General Electric Global Research Center, Information and Decision Technology Labs, 1 Research Circle, Schenectady, New York 12309
Marc Garbiras: General Electric Global Research Center, Information and Decision Technology Labs, 1 Research Circle, Schenectady, New York 12309

Operations Research, 2004, vol. 52, issue 3, 337-345

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.

Keywords: programming; multiple criteria; integer; applications; production/scheduling; approximations/heuristic; information systems; decision support systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.1030.0083 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:52:y:2004:i:3:p:337-345

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().