NBC's optimization systems added $200M in ad revenue between 1996 and 2000

NBC, then a subsidiary of General Electric, sells a fixed amount of advertising airtime, valuable inventory that disappears when the show airs. Its sales process relied on manually assembled plans, which created bottlenecks and made it slow to respond to client requests.

GE's Corporate Research and Development Center built optimization-based sales systems for NBC. The systems estimate demand for airtime by show and by week, schedule commercials against limited inventory, and generate sales plans that meet client requirements quickly, making the most profitable use of each slot.

Between 1996 and 2000 the systems increased revenues by over $200 million, improved sales-force productivity, cut rework by over 80 percent, and improved customer satisfaction. The tools became an integral and essential part of NBC's sales process.

Optimize the sale of airtime

Demand estimation turned scarce airtime into a priced, optimized inventory.

Automated plans removed the manual bottleneck between salespeople and clients.

Rework fell over 80% because plans met requirements the first time.

When the product is perishable inventory, sales planning is an optimization problem: demand estimation plus scheduling against capacity removed NBC's bottlenecks and lifted revenue.

NBC's sales systems stayed embedded in the network's selling process, and the Interfaces case became a widely cited example of applying operations research to media sales.