Managing TV commercials inventory in the Italian advertising market

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of a TV broadcaster, managing its programs schedule. A TV network is considered that has to decide on accepting and scheduling requests from its advertisers. A request is formulated both in terms of people to be reached and of budget available for the advertisement campaign. Moreover, several formulations of the problem are presented and defined in such a way as to handle different aspects of the real process: compatibility among advertisements that are scheduled in the same break; compatibility between advertisements and breaks; price discrimination due to the different positions of the advertisements within a break. Since the introduced models are computationally intractable, several heuristics are presented whose performance are evaluated in an extensive computational study based on test problems defined by considering the peculiarities of the Italian advertisements market.

Keywords:

• TV commercials scheduling
• revenue maximisation
• mathematical models
• heuristics

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.