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How do I schedule advertisements? |
Creator is primarily a music and jingle scheduler. It is not specifically designed to schedule commercials, although many successfully use Creator to schedule commercials.
Traffic/billing schedulers are dedicated to scheduling commercials and also provide a client billing facility. These can save a lot of time, particularly when many advertisers are involved, and when each client wants their ads scheduled at specific times of the day.
Creator Pro integrates with 3rd party traffic schedulers, using the Traffic Importer in the Playlist Editor. Natural Log is recommended.
Users often adopt their own system of scheduling commercials with Creator. Here are some of them.
Random Method
This method can be the easiest to setup and manage, providing you have a limited range of advertising packages, and advertisers do not dictate when their ads will be scheduled.
Place all the commercials in one large folder on the hard drive and create one spot group for this folder. Set the Sort Type to Randomly.
If you have say 2 or 3 different advertising packages with a different amount of placements per day, create 2 or 3 spot groups instead of 1.
Now schedule the spot group in your rotation(s). For example, if you have 4 advertisements that need to be played 6 times over a 12 hour period, 2 ads per hour must be scheduled in the rotation...
6 Per Day Ads
6 Per Day Ads
Station ID
This method is very easy to set up and manage provided the number of ads in each spot group are kept at a constant number. When an advertisement finishes, either add a new advertisement to replace it, or add a fill in jingle or ad for your own programmes. This does not then require changes to the rotations.
But If additional ads need to be added to this group, the rotation will need to be modified to include an extra ad per hour (to handle 6 advertisers), or a new commercial break at a different time of the hour.
Only a small number of rotations may be required using this method, perhaps only 1 rotation, and the spot group, rotations, and schedules should not need regular adjustments from day to day.
Block Method
This method requires one spot group for each commercial break. This provides full control over what is played when, and allows the number of commercials in the commercial break to vary from one day to the next, without the need to adjust the rotations or schedules on a regular basis.
In this method, a set of files are usually individually added to each spot group associated with a commercial break. Set the Spot Group Type to Block.
To schedule the ads in the precise order specified, set the Sort option to Per Folder/Unsorted. Otherwise Randomly is a good option if you intend to use the same set of commercials in other commercial breaks during the day.
Add the Spot Group once to a rotation to schedule all the ads at once.
This method will often require a rotation for each hour that you advertise. If this is 24 hours a day, then you may need 24 rotations, unless some commercial breaks are to be repeated.
Adjustments to each commercial break spot group or folder may be required every day to ensure the same commercials are not always played together in the same break.
Some operators use a spreadsheet to design what ads should be played and when, and the files moved into the required spot groups every day, for the following days playlist.
Individual Method
In this method, a spot group is created for each advertiser. The spot group is then placed in the specific desired locations in many rotations.
This method also requires up to 24 rotations for unique placements every hour.
Adjustments to each rotation is likely to be required every day to ensure the same commercials are not played in the same order every time.
Some operators use a spreadsheet to design what ads should be played and when, and the rotations modified every day, for the following days playlist.
Manual Method
If only a few commercials are to be played, the Playlist Editor facility in Creator can be used to simply insert the files into any position in any hour of the generated playlist. The Playlist Editor supports drag & drop from a Windows folder, or use the Insert dialog.
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