Television advertising is a highly-visible part of the media industry in the UK, and commercial television channels rely on their advertising revenues. Slotting is the process of deciding which advertisements are shown in each break.
We developed the slotting system which is in daily use at ITV to plan which advertisements appear in each and every commercial break on ITV. This is a large and complex problem with many business and regulatory constraints which is best solved through optimisation. Finding a good solution which makes the most efficient use of the available airtime allows ITV to extract more revenues while satisfying the advertisers’ preferences more closely. Slotting just one region of the major TV channels requires solving a problem with millions of variables and constraints. The obvious CPLEX implementation was unable to find even a first feasible solution inside 24 hours, so we implemented a very-large neighbourhood search (VLNS) algorithm with CPLEX to accelerate the search and find very good quality solutions in a few hours.
We also maintain and support the slotting optimiser that is used by Channel 4 Television for their major channels. This is a very similar problem to that at ITV, however the solution is structured differently to better accommodate the different business processes at Channel 4.
Please Note: While we are happy for you to contact us in regards to further details about any of the projects that we have carried out, we respect our customers’ confidentiality; therefore we will only ever pass on information for which we have already obtained permission to do so.