Assigning television commercial videotapes to time slots under alternative message spacing policies

A number of studies in the psychological and marketing literature have focused on the effects of message spacing on consumer memory and judgement. The importance of message spacing has also been exemplified by a crucial scheduling problem in the broadcast television industry that requires the assignment of multiple airings of commercial videotapes to purchased slots of air time. Existing models for this problem are restricted to the case of equal spacing of successive airings in terms of slot position. In light of the fact that equal spacing of messages is not necessarily the best course of action in all situations, we present an alternative model that enables greater flexibility with respect to the spacing of commercial messages. For example, the model allows for equal temporal spacing of commercials in addition to equal spacing in terms of slot position. More importantly, the model permits spacing options that allow for pulsing strategies associated with well-separated bursts of commercial airings, as well as the consideration of spacing decisions when commercials have different durations. We demonstrate a heuristic for solving the scheduling problem under various message spacing policies. We believe that our model, which is effective and adaptable, has considerable promise for practical scheduling problems as well as subsequent experimental research.