Ad Groups & Rotation

A campaign carries one or more ad groups. Each appearance of the campaign shows exactly one group; groups take turns from appearance to appearance.

Each ad in a group is a creative — the media asset — combined with its placement settings: duration, order, activity windows. Groups let one campaign vary what plays on air — different cuts, different products, a storytelling sequence — while remaining a single unit of frequency, budget, and reporting. You do not need to split a campaign to rotate creatives.

Rotation

Groups rotate round-robin, in the order you arrange them: group 1 plays in the campaign’s first appearance, group 2 in the second, and so on, wrapping back to group 1. Showing all G groups once takes G appearances.

Example: one campaign, two ad sets

Campaign with period equal to the block, two groups:

  • Group 1 — ads A (5 s) and B (5 s), distributed

  • Group 2 — ad C (10 s)

Block 1 → group 1: A and B spread evenly across the block
Block 2 → group 2: C
Block 3 → group 1 again (cycle repeats)

If a campaign has several ads and no explicit grouping, each ad behaves as its own single-ad group: ads rotate one per appearance. This is the familiar default rotation.

Layout: distributed or glued

The layout controls how the ads of the active group are placed within one appearance:

Layout Behavior

Distributed

Each ad is a separate spot; the spots are spread as evenly as possible across the appearance window.

Glued

All ads of the group play back to back as one continuous spot, in the order you list them — the "stick ads together" option of a group. Use it for storytelling sequences that must not be interrupted.

All ads of the active group play within one appearance of the campaign — the engine never smears a group across several appearances:

  • Period equal to the block — the group’s ads spread across that block (the classic case).

  • Period longer than the block — the campaign appears in some blocks only; the whole group plays inside each block where it appears.

  • Period shorter than the block — the campaign appears several times per block, and each appearance carries the full group within its window.

Ad order within a group

Ads play in the order you list them in the group: for a glued group that is the playback sequence; for a distributed group it is the placement priority. The first ad of the rotation is the first one you listed.

Groups with different footprints

A group’s footprint is the total length of its ads. Groups of one campaign may differ in footprint — a 5-second cut alternating with a 15-second cut, or a two-ad group alternating with a three-ad one.

The engine supports this fully, with three observable consequences:

  • Blocks vary slightly in length. The block carrying the bigger footprint runs a little over nominal, the block with the smaller one a little under. The variation is bounded by the footprint difference and balances out across the loop — expected behavior.

  • Air-time accounting uses the average. For capacity and overbooking purposes the campaign counts as its average group footprint per appearance. A campaign alternating 5 s and 15 s occupies 10 s per appearance on average, and that is the number that must fit into the block.

  • The loop grows to cover every variant. The loop extends until each group of the campaign has appeared, so the pattern genuinely repeats — see Playlist Structure.

In a dense block, the ads of one distributed group can end up adjacent to each other — with a 2-ad group and little other material, there is simply nothing to put between them. The engine inserts other content between group ads whenever the mix allows it.