Commercial Sales in Cable Television - an Overview and a Linear Model

This paper deals with the sales of commercial advertisements in the cable television industry. It describes in detail the dynamics of the entire process, and develops the notion of an audience loss function, the minimization of which is equally desirable to both networks as well as advertisers. A simple, yet robust linear model is described for optimizing this loss function, subject to the constraints that are typically inherent in the process. This is followed by a numerical illustration that uses real-world data, and a discussion on the use of the model. 1 Management Science Associates, Pittsburgh, PA 15232 2 Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 1526