Booking and capacity

Reserving an automated guaranteed campaign is the moment the operator makes a promise. This page says exactly what that promise is worth.

It is for the employees who reserve campaigns — owner, admin, manager — and for the owner or admin employee who sets the overbooking ceiling on an automated guaranteed price list.

The one guarantee this product makes

When a campaign moves to reserved, CityScreen Context recomputes capacity for every face the campaign targets, over every period it targets, and refuses the reservation if the requested frequency would not fit.

That is the guarantee: at the moment of booking, the airtime existed and nothing else had claimed it. It is checked again from scratch on every reservation, so a campaign reserved yesterday is already counted against the one reserved today.

Whether the screens will be switched on, whether the content management system will honor the schedule and whether the plays will happen are outside this check. See Scope of the check.

How capacity is computed

The check runs per face and per period. For each stretch of time inside the campaign’s window it works out three numbers.

Number Where it comes from

Available

Milliseconds of sellable airtime in that stretch, reported by the content management system when the platform asks it for saturation. This reflects the real playout loop on that screen.

Saturated

Milliseconds already occupied. Two sources are added together: what the content management system reports as taken by anything already scheduled, and what other automated guaranteed campaigns have booked but the content management system does not yet know about.

Ceiling

The maximum allowed overbooking percentage from the AG price list covering that face.

The arithmetic is then:

allowed        = available × ceiling ÷ 100
remaining      = allowed − saturated
max frequency  = remaining ÷ creative duration

The face’s usable answer is the smallest max frequency across all the stretches of time in the window, because a booking has to fit in its worst hour, not its average one. If the requested frequency is larger than that, the reservation is refused. The refusal names the nearest frequency in the AG price list’s grid that would have fit, or says that no slot of that creative duration is available at all.

The overbooking ceiling

Maximum allowed overbooking is a percentage held on the AG price list, so it applies to every face that price list covers.

It defaults to 100 and cannot be set below it. At 100, the ceiling equals measured capacity, and total booked frequency cannot exceed what the content management system says exists.

Above 100 the operator is deliberately selling more than physical capacity, on the assumption that not all of it will be exercised at once. That is a commercial decision, and the platform honors it: an AG price list set to 150 accepts reservations up to one and a half times measured capacity.

To hold inventory back, leave those faces off the AG price list.

Restriction periods

An AG price list may also carry a broadcast restriction: a limit on how much of one playout block automated guaranteed campaigns may take, written either as a number of seconds or as a percentage of the block.

Where the campaign being reserved would push automated guaranteed load past that limit, the reservation is refused for that stretch of time, and the message gives the offending start and end. Restriction periods are checked alongside the capacity arithmetic, and a campaign has to pass both.

The same restriction narrows the answer given to a demand partner asking what is available before it proposes anything. See Forecasting availability.

Reserving what was proposed

A reservation has to match the terms the demand partner put on the table. Before the capacity check runs, the platform compares what the employee is about to reserve against what the partner proposed, face by face: frequency, creative duration, periods, broadcast windows, and the total price. Any difference and the reservation is refused as changed data.

That is what makes the review loop necessary:

  1. The partner proposes terms.

  2. The employee wants different ones — a lower frequency, a shorter window, a different price. The employee sets those terms and sends the campaign back for review, which returns the amended terms to the partner.

  3. The partner resubmits on the new terms, and the campaign returns to approving.

  4. Now the terms on both sides agree, and the campaign can be reserved.

A campaign sitting in review waits for the partner and is reserved after it returns to approving.

Scope of the check

The capacity check answers one question at one moment: whether the requested frequency fits when the campaign is reserved.

  • The reservation lives in CityScreen Context. The content management system learns about the campaign when it is activated and pushed — see Delivery.

  • Delivered plays are available for comparison with the plan — see Under-delivery.

  • Ordinary bidding fills whatever the content management system offers it. The saturation figure is where the two meet, and it reflects the last time it was refreshed.

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