The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Product decision · 2016-2017
Turner's LEO cut ad make-good planning from weeks to minutes
When TV ratings fall short, Turner owes advertisers make-goods; an optimizer allocated them across hundreds of plans in minutes.
Turner Broadcasting System
the move
TV networks guarantee advertisers audience levels; when actual audiences fall short, they owe make-good units in later airings. Allocating these audience deficiency units across hundreds of sales plans, in a setting where priorities change constantly, took Turner weeks of manual negotiation and left money on the table.
Turner built the Liability Efficiency Optimizer (LEO), an optimisation framework that allocates make-good units across sales plans while honouring advertiser requirements on selling-title mix and unit distribution across weeks.
LEO cut the allocation process from weeks to minutes, was deployed across all of Turner's domestic networks, and produced a conservatively estimated $10 million per year in recurring liability reduction versus the manual process it replaced.
why it works
- It treated make-good allocation as an optimisation, not a negotiation.
- Faster allocation freed planners and let priorities change fluidly.
- Advertiser constraints were encoded, so relationships were protected.
- $10M a year of recurring liability reduction is measurable value.
what transfers
Obligations you owe are inventory too. When a shortfall creates a liability, allocate the remedy optimally instead of first-come-first-served, minutes of compute replacing weeks of manual work.
what came after
LEO remained in use across Turner's networks; the work was published in Interfaces (2017) and was a finalist paper in the INFORMS Wagner Prize competition.
references
- Turner Optimizes the Allocation of Audience Deficiency Units
- Turner Optimizes the Allocation of Audience Deficiency Units
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