Advert Scheduling
Purchasing the Advanced Scheduling module unlocks advert scheduling: building advert campaigns, scheduling the advert log and playing advert blocks in PlayIt Live. Without a valid Advanced Scheduling module applied it is not possible to schedule the advert log or play advert blocks. You can try the module out by going to Settings > License and choosing to enable the Advanced Scheduling module.
Advert scheduling allows the scheduling of adverts (also called spots, commercials or traffic). This is accomplished by setting up advert campaigns containing adverts, then adding an advert block to the playout log and scheduling the advert log for that hour.
Key concepts
Advert Campaign
An advert campaign represents an advert sales order: a request from a customer to play a set of adverts a specified number of times, during certain times of the day, for a period of time. Advert campaigns in the same category will never be scheduled in the same block. See Advert Campaigns and Editing Advert Campaigns.
Advert
An advert represents a cut of audio to play as part of an advert campaign. An advert also stores at what times of the day the audio will play, up to a maximum number of plays. Adverts feature a duration field which is used to schedule the advert. This is best kept to a multiple of 5, for example 10, 15 or 30 seconds, to ensure that adverts can be fitted into advert blocks of 1 minute, 2 minutes, and so on. See Editing Adverts.
Advert Block
An advert block is a sequence of adverts that are played together as part of the advert log.
Advert Log
The historical log and future log of the adverts that have played and will play. See Advert Log.
Advert Block Item
An advert block item can be added to a clock or the playout log in order to actually play out the adverts.
Adding an advert block item to the playout log instructs the playout engine to look up the adverts from the advert log for the specified hour and start time and load them into a player. Despite being multiple tracks, advert block items only take up one player: the same player is reused for each advert track.
Adding an advert block item to a clock will add the equivalent item to the playout log for any hour the clock is scheduled into.
In this section
- Advert Campaigns: list campaigns and add new ones.
- Editing Advert Campaigns: set the name, dates, categories, adverts and scheduling rules for a campaign.
- Editing Adverts: configure an individual advert's track, priority, dates, maximum plays and day/hour distribution.
- Advert Log: view the scheduled advert plays for a date range, grouped by hour.