Forecasting availability

Before anyone proposes an automated guaranteed campaign, both sides want the same answer: what can still be sold on this face, over these dates, at what price.

CityScreen Context answers that question. This page says precisely which question it answers and where the numbers come from.

It is for the employees — owner, admin, manager, viewer — who use the availability tools inside the cabinet.

The question the platform answers

The available-sales query takes a date range and a set of faces, and returns, for each face, the combinations of creative duration and frequency from the operator’s price grid that would still fit — and over which stretches of those dates each one fits.

The answer describes capacity now. Two partners asking the same question one minute apart can get different answers if a campaign was reserved in between, and asking the question holds no airtime.

The price returned for each combination already includes the platform’s commission, so it is the figure the partner is charged against.

A face with no automated guaranteed price list, or a price list with no prices, is left out of the answer.

How the number is arrived at

The same arithmetic as the reservation check, run speculatively.

The platform asks the content management system how saturated each face is over the window.
It subtracts what other automated guaranteed campaigns have already booked over the same window.
It applies the overbooking ceiling from the AG price list.
For each creative duration in the price grid it works out the largest frequency that still fits, and keeps every price-grid entry whose frequency is no larger than that.
It removes the stretches of time a restriction period puts out of bounds.

Because it is the same arithmetic, an answer from this query and a reservation made immediately afterward agree. Because the inputs move, an answer from this query and a reservation made an hour later need not.

A stretch of time where a face is already fully saturated is dropped outright, unless the price list’s ceiling is above 100 percent — overbooking is the only thing that keeps a full face sellable. See Booking and capacity.

Restriction periods change the answer

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

Where adding the frequency being asked about would carry automated guaranteed load past that cap, the affected stretch is left out of the answer. The surrounding stretches are returned separately, which is why one price-grid combination can come back with several date ranges.

This is why a face can look busy in the answer while its raw saturation says otherwise: the capacity exists, and the operator’s price list has put it out of bounds.

The same questions from inside the cabinet

The same computation runs behind the campaign screen for an owner, admin, manager or viewer, and is what the inventory tab calls as terms are edited.

What it answers	Where it is used
Saturation and the largest frequency that would fit, for a set of faces over given periods and creative durations, together with the ceiling in force and a flag for whether the face is already overbooked.	Recomputed as the employee edits frequency, duration and windows, so the screen can refuse a reservation before it is submitted.
The number of ad plays a given frequency, set of periods and set of broadcast windows produces on a face.	Multiplied by the price per play to give the campaign’s total, which the employee may then discount.

What it answers

Where it is used

Saturation and the largest frequency that would fit, for a set of faces over given periods and creative durations, together with the ceiling in force and a flag for whether the face is already overbooked.

Recomputed as the employee edits frequency, duration and windows, so the screen can refuse a reservation before it is submitted.

The number of ad plays a given frequency, set of periods and set of broadcast windows produces on a face.

Multiplied by the price per play to give the campaign’s total, which the employee may then discount.

The play count follows from the broadcast time inside the chosen periods and windows, less the face’s daily downtime, and from the chosen frequency. That figure is stored on the campaign as its planned volume. Delivered plays can be compared with it; see Under-delivery.

The waiting-items counter

The automated guaranteed section carries a counter of items waiting for attention.

It shows two numbers: how many campaigns and how many advertisements in the organization are sitting in the Approving queue.

For a viewer restricted to a single legal entity, both counts are narrowed to that entity’s faces.

Booking and capacity — the same arithmetic at the moment it becomes binding.
AG price lists — the duration and frequency grid this query walks, and where the overbooking ceiling and broadcast restriction are set.
Availability and saturation — what saturation measures and how fresh it is.