Separation Categories
Separation categories keep campaigns that should not touch — typically direct competitors — away from each other on air. Assign the same category (say, "automotive") to several campaigns, and the engine enforces distance between them.
A campaign can belong to several categories at once; every one of them is enforced.
The hard guarantee: never back to back
Two spots of campaigns sharing a category never play adjacent, including across the loop boundary — the same guarantee that protects two spots of a single campaign.
This is a hard rule: a playlist violating it fails the final verdict, see Planning Quality.
Fillers are not exempt: a filler carrying a category is kept away from campaigns of that category just like any commercial spot.
The soft goal: even category spread
Beyond mere non-adjacency, the engine also tries to spread each category evenly across the block, as if the category were one meta-campaign: four automotive spots per block should each sit roughly a quarter block apart.
This is a quality goal. It ranks below even distribution of individual campaigns and below starting blocks in the engine’s priority order; when the mix is too dense, category spacing yields first and the playlist reports a warning with details.
| Categories constrain the engine’s freedom of placement. Assign them where the business requires separation, and expect denser categories to cost some distribution quality for their members. |