Hello everyone,
This is my first post after a couple of years of monitoring the discussions.
As I reside and work in Serbia, I would be grateful for some insider information from other radio sales markets around the Globe. Here's what I would be greatful to hear from you: what does your most common monthly advertising "package" (contract) offer to local advertisers? How many repeatings throughout a day, and how do you schedule the campaign according to dayparts? Are the broadcasing hours exactly the same from day to day?
Here's why I am curious about your feedback: our most common agreement with the locals is 6 repeatings / day, scheduled from 6 AM to 9 PM. Unable to set up our existing automation software to schedule the commercial breaks the way we wanted to, and as there were several issues why we decided not to switch to another automation plaftorm, we had decided to develop our own software that would schedule the ads according to given preferences. The sofware would create the m3u playlists (for commercial breaks only), which our main automation would then import and play at the given time. Now it's up to us to instruct the IT guys on how exactly do we want to set up the schedule for each campaign. The idea is to have a simple schedule (xy times a day, same hours from day to day), an advanced schedule (automatic selection of hours within a specific daypart, i.e. 3 times between 5AM and 9AM, then 3 times from 5PM to 9PM, the exact hours been randomly changed on daily basis), and a manual schedule (whereas we would have to enter each repeating manually, for the entire campaign) to choose from.
Any other suggestions? To ask the same question from the first paragraph in a different way, what kind of schedule would you request if this sofware should meet the specifics of your local market?
Many thanks for your time,
Vladimir, Novi Sad, Serbia
Our broadcast schedule is from 6am to Midnight, seven days a week. We will occasionally offer clients free bonus spots overnight from Midnight to 6am. Most clients will air 5 or 6 ads per day if they are doing a one or two week campaign. Occasionally a client will want to run a really heavy campaign and run 8 or 10 ads per day.
One other note - we also have advertisers that wish to have more of a constant presence on the station, so they will just run 1 of 2 ads per day, every day of the month. If these clients commit to a 6 month advertising contract, they receive a significant discount on the rate because there's less administration from the station and rep. The ads run - all the station has to do is have a writer contact the client to update their commercial message once a month or so.
Hope that helps.
Hi Vladimir,
If the software were to do precisely what I wanted it to do, it would randomly distribute the daily schedule of ads within the selected daypart, (depending on campaign goals) this would range from 5 to 15 ads per day. The following days of that week ads will fall in at different times than the day before but still within selected daypart. I like to run between 50 and 60 spots per month for the average client, and I typically distribute this over just 2 weeks instead of 4. I go every other week if it is a branding campaign. This allows my daily frequency to stay at 5 or higher. Fewer ads than that and the listener simply does not have a chance to hear ad a sufficient number of times in a week of listening to remember and ultimately decide if they will act on the advertiser's call to action. I hope this helps.I am impressed with your station's ingenuity to develop your own software for this. Best wishes.
Roger
Thanks a lot, Roger!
Thanks very much, James!
