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Scheduling Commercials on Broadcast Television

General Electric Global Research Center, Information and Decision Technology Labs, 1 Research Circle, Schenectady, New York 12309
General Electric Global Research Center, Information and Decision Technology Labs, 1 Research Circle, Schenectady, New York 12309
bollapragada{at}research.ge.com
garbiras{at}research.ge.com

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.

Subject classifications: programming; multiple criteria; integer; applications; production/scheduling; approximations/heuristic; information systems; decision support systems.
History: Received August 2002; revision received April 2003; accepted July 2003.

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