Advertising Scheduling

In this chapter, you will learn how to use the advertising part of mAirListDB to schedule commercials (spots) into advertising blocks, and how these blocks get into your playlists.

The advertising part of mAirListDB can be found on the Advertising tab in the database application.

Overview

Advertising scheduling in mAirList is based on the following concepts:

• Blocks: Each hour has a fixed number of advertising blocks (breaks), e.g. one at :15 and one at :45. The blocks are defined in the Advertising Settings, separately for each station.
• Campaigns: A campaign assigns a spot (an item from the library) to a set of blocks, e.g. “block 1 on weekdays from 6 to 10 AM”, within a particular period of time. Each spot can have any number of campaigns.
• Containers: When a playlist is generated, each block is inserted into the playlist as an advertising container holding the spots scheduled for that block. The container remembers which block of which hour it represents, so its contents can be refreshed later on with Update Advertising, e.g. after a campaign has been changed.

Instead of using the internal scheduler, a block can also be filled with logs imported from an external traffic system.

Advertising Settings

Before you can schedule any campaigns, you must define the advertising blocks. In the database app, go to Administration -> Advertising Settings….

The settings apply to the station that is currently selected in the database app. Changing them requires administrator permissions.

Block Definition

Set the Number of available blocks per hour first. The list below then shows one entry for each block. Select a block in order to edit its settings on the right-hand side.

General

• Name: A name for the block, e.g. “Break :15”. If left empty, the block is named “Block 1”, “Block 2”, etc.
• Source: Internal to schedule the block with the campaigns from the database, or one of the Import Sources to fill it from an external scheduler (see External Sources). Click Configure… to set up the selected import source.
• Region count: If you use regionalization, enter the number of regions this block is split into. Leave at 0 for a block without regional content.

Imaging

Select library items that are automatically added to the block:

• Opener: Inserted at the beginning of the block.
• Closer: Inserted at the end of the block.
• Inliner: Inserted between each two spots.

Imaging is only added when the block contains at least one spot. Click a field to select the item, and click the button at the right-hand side of the field to remove it.

Advanced

• Block number alias: The block number that is used when requesting the block from an import source. By default, this is the same as the block number. Change it if the numbering of your external scheduler differs from the one in mAirList.
• Projected time: The time within the hour when the block is expected to start, e.g. 00:15:00. It is shown in the preview, and used by Insert Advertising to place the block at the right position in the playlist.

Container

• Always create a container: If checked (the default), the block is always inserted into the playlist as an advertising container. If unchecked, the spots are inserted as individual items instead, unless the block has regional content. Note that only containers can be refreshed with Update Advertising, and Insert Advertising requires all blocks to be set up as containers.
• Container Settings: The Artist, Title, Type and Color of the container item in the playlist. The title defaults to the block name, the artist to “Advertising”.
• Region Container Settings: For blocks with regional content, the Auto fill method and Filler item used to compensate for different durations of the regions (None, Silence, Use filler (fade out at end), Use filler (fade in and play until end)).

Import and Export

Use the Export… and Import… buttons to save the advertising settings to a file and load them again, e.g. in order to copy them to another station.

External Sources

If your commercials are scheduled with an external traffic system, set the Source of the blocks to one of the eight available Import Sources, and click Configure… to set up the import. Here you select the file format of the external scheduler and the location of the log files.

The filename usually contains the date and hour, and optionally the block and region number, so that mAirList can find the right file for each block. See Playlist Import Filenames for the available variables.

Blocks with an external source are not shown in the campaign editor and the preview on the Advertising tab. They are filled from the import files whenever the block is inserted into a playlist or updated.

Advertising Tab

The Advertising tab consists of two parts:

• The list of campaigns on the left-hand side. Use the tabs above the list to show only Current, Future or Expired campaigns of the current station, or All campaigns. Each entry shows the title and ID of the spot, the description, and the period of the campaign (or permanent if it has no start and end date).
• The preview on the right-hand side. It shows the result of the scheduling for one week, with one column per day, and one row for each block of each hour. Each cell shows the number of spots and the total duration of the block. Expand a block to see the individual spots.

When you select a campaign in the list, all blocks and spots belonging to this campaign are highlighted in the preview. Vice versa, clicking a spot in the preview selects its campaign in the list, and double-clicking it opens the campaign for editing.

If any of the internal blocks has regional content, a row of tabs below the preview lets you switch between the regions.

The toolbar provides the following functions:

• Reload: Reload all campaigns from the database.
• Previous and Next: Show the previous or next week in the preview.
• New: Create a new campaign.
• Copy: Create a new campaign with the settings of the selected one.
• Delete: Delete the selected campaign.
• Edit: Edit the selected campaign.
• Report: Show an On Air Log of the selected campaign’s spot for the run time of the campaign on the Reporting tab.

You can also create a campaign directly from the library: Right-click an item, and select Create Advertising Campaign… from the context menu. In the library tree, the Advertising node lists all items of type Advertising, optionally filtered by campaign.

Editing Campaigns

The Edit Campaign dialog has the following tabs.

General

• Spot: The library item that is scheduled by this campaign. Click the field to select an item.
• Reminder: Optionally, a second item that is played at the end of the same block, e.g. a short “tag” referring to the spot.
• Description: An optional description, shown in the campaign list.
• Start and End: The period in which the campaign is active. Uncheck either field to leave the period open on that side. The start and end are compared with the beginning of the hour: a block is included if its hour starts at or after the start time, and before the end time. The end time defaults to 23:59:59, so that the last day is included.
• Priority and Placement: These determine the position of the spot within the block, see Order of Spots below.
• Campaign is enabled: Uncheck to temporarily suspend the campaign without deleting it.

Stations

Check the stations the campaign is scheduled on. If you use station groups, there is one tab for each group. New campaigns are assigned to the current station by default.

Regions

If you use regionalization, check the regions the spot is scheduled in. New campaigns are assigned to all regions by default.

Blocks

This is where you assign the spot to the blocks of a regular week. The grid has one column for each day of the week, and one row for each block of each hour (e.g. 06 / 2 for the second block of the 6 AM hour). Blocks assigned to the campaign are highlighted in green.

• Click a cell to assign or unassign a single block.
• Click the first column of a row to toggle this block on all days.
• Shift-click the first column of a row to toggle this block number in all hours on all days.
• Click a column header to toggle all blocks of that day, or the top-left header to toggle all blocks of the week.

Below the grid, mAirList shows the number of blocks selected per week, and, if both a start and end date are set, the total number of plays during the campaign.

Use Save Assignment… and Load Assignment… to store a block assignment in a file and apply it to other campaigns.

Manual Blocks

In addition to the weekly assignment, you can assign the spot to individual blocks on particular dates. The grid shows one month at a time, use the < and > buttons to switch between months. It works the same as the Blocks grid.

Manual blocks are scheduled regardless of the Start and End date and the weekly assignment, as long as the campaign is enabled and assigned to the station.

Order of Spots

For each block, mAirList collects all campaigns that are active for that block, and sorts the spots as follows:

1. Spots with the placement Towards beginning come first, spots with the placement Towards end come last, all others (Anywhere) in between.
2. Within each of these groups, spots are sorted by Priority, lower numbers first.
3. Spots with the same placement and priority are sorted in a random order, which changes from hour to hour, but stays the same when the block is scheduled again.

After all spots, the reminders of the campaigns are added in the same order. Finally, the opener, inliners and closer are added as configured for the block.

Regional Content

If none of the spots of a block is limited to particular regions, the block is created as a normal container. Otherwise, it is created as a region container, with separate content for each region: Each region then contains the spots whose campaigns have this region checked.

Getting Advertising into the Playlist

There are two ways to insert advertising blocks into a playlist:

• Hour templates: Add an Advertising element to the hour template, and select the Block it represents (see Scheduling). When the playlist is generated, the element is replaced with the scheduled block.
• Insert Advertising: In the playlist editor, select Generate -> Insert Advertising to add all blocks of the current hour to the playlist. Each block is placed at its projected time according to the backtiming. Blocks that are already present in the playlist are skipped.

Update Advertising

Playlists are often generated days or weeks in advance, while campaigns are booked and changed until the last minute. Update Advertising rebuilds all advertising containers of a playlist from the current advertising schedule (or the current import files, for blocks from an external source), and replaces their contents if they have changed. Items outside of advertising containers are not affected.

Update Advertising is available in the following places:

• In the playlist editor of the database app, select Generate -> Update Advertising.
• In the Go To… dialog of the playlist editor, right-click an hour, a day or the week, and select Update Advertising to update all playlists of that hour, day or week.
• In the playout window, right-click the playlist, and select This Playlist… -> Update advertising.
• When loading playlists from the database with an action, check Update advertising (and optionally If advertising was updated, save playlist to database) to always play the latest schedule. See Actions.
• In scripts, use the UpdateAdvertising and UpdateAdvertisingEx procedures.

After the update, mAirList reports the number of containers that were inspected and changed, along with any errors.

Two options in the database connection properties affect the update: Refuse advertising update when new block has errors keeps the previous content of a block if the new one contains errors (e.g. because an import file is missing), and Use as default database for Update Advertising selects the database to use for blocks that were scheduled from a database this instance is not connected to.