Fillers
Fillers occupy the air time that commercial campaigns do not — house promos, weather, news, decorative content. Under full-block policies they are what makes "no dead air" possible.
| Commercial campaigns get first claim on every second of a block; fillers cover only what commerce cannot take. |
Two kinds of filler
| Kind | Behavior |
|---|---|
Filler by frequency |
Has its own frequency and participates in planning like a commercial campaign — counted in the rhythm, spread evenly, guaranteed its frequency. Use it for content you have contractual obligations for. |
System filler |
Has no frequency of its own. Pure padding: fills whatever time remains after everything else is placed. |
Fillers carry a flat list of ads; ad groups belong to commercial campaigns. Fillers do respect separation categories and never stand adjacent to campaigns they are separated from.
Per-ad placement rules
Each filler ad carries two settings.
Display mode — how many times per block
| Mode | Behavior |
|---|---|
At least once |
Plays at least once in every block; may repeat to fill remaining time. |
Only once |
Plays exactly once per block — never repeated. Use for content that gets stale on repetition. |
As needed (default) |
No guaranteed minimum — strictly zero appearances if higher-priority fillers already filled the block; otherwise tops up only the remainder. Placed after all only once and at least once fillers. |
Guarantees are best-effort — with one exception
Filler placement rules are quality goals: when space runs out, the engine still plans and reports a warning — see Planning Quality.
The exception is at least once under a graceful-degradation policy: there the block stretches to fit everything, fillers included, so the "at least once" minimum is genuinely guaranteed. Under a strict policy the opposite holds: when space runs short, fillers are sacrificed first, regardless of mode, to protect commercial campaigns.
Distribution and remainders
The engine spreads fillers between commercial spots. Long runs of consecutive fillers are flagged with a warning — except in blocks where fillers exceed half the content, where some bunching is arithmetically unavoidable.
A block’s remaining time can also be unfillable: three only once fillers of 5 s can cover at most 15 s, and a remainder smaller than your shortest filler cannot be covered at all. The pre-flight check computes this unfillable gap in advance, and the final verdict treats it as expected.
| Give the engine filler variety. A single 15-second filler cannot patch a 10-second remainder; a 5-second filler in the mix patches almost anything. |