Department of Management Information Systems

Boğaziçi University

Department of Management Information Systems

MIS 463 Decision Support Systems for Business

A DSS for MEDIA PLANNING COMPANIES

“ADsPLANNER”

by

Hakan Baykuşlar

Süleyman Cabir Çıplak

Seda Sesgör

Cemile Handan Yılmaz

Instructor : Aslı Sencer Erdem

İstanbul - December, 2007

I. INTRODUCTION 3

I.1 Mission of Project 3

I.2 Users and Analysis of Decision 4

Decision 4

Decision Makers 5

Scope 5

Period 5

Nature and Complexity of Decision 6

Bottlenecks and Constraints 6

Current Level of Goal Attainment in the Existing System 6

Sensitivity of the Decision To Certain Input Parameters 7

Significance of the Problem 8

I.3 Scope of Project 8

II. LITERATURE SURVEY 9

II.1 The Concept of “Media Planning” and Basic Terms 9

II.2 Computerized Systems and Operations Research Studies for Media Planning 11

II.3 Rules and Applications In Turkey 12

III. DATA SOURCE AND FLOW MECHANISMS 13

IV. DEVELOPMENT OF THE DSS 13

IV.1. DSS Architecture 13

IV.2. Model and Algorithms 15

Terminology 15

Algorithm 16

Formulation of The Problem 18

IV.3. User Interface and Reports 29

IV.4. Data Structure 32

Technical Issues 32

V. ASSESSMENT 33

VI. CONCLUSION 34

REFERENCES 35

Appendix 36

Appendix 1: Other Information Sources 36

Appendix 2: Source Codes 38

I. INTRODUCTION

AdsPlanner is mainly designed for the media planning companies. Media planning companies use AdsPlanner when they have to make an advertising plan for their client company in accordance with its marketing strategies. The proposed system specifically gives support to company’s advertising strategies on TVs. The aim of AdsPlanner is to devise an optimum route for the delivery of the promotional message to the target audience depending on some constraints such as budget allocated for TV ads by client company.

In today’s business environment, tasks are highly complicated so that making a decision becomes much more complex. Especially in media sector everything depends on the “rating” issue and in that case if the ratings are high then the price of a TV ad automatically increases. Companies’ strategies are not always the same in terms of segmentation, for instance one company may want to reach all of the people not considering gender like Coca Cola, on the other hand, other company may want to reach only kids like Kinder Chocolate. The core point is reaching as many members of the target audience as possible. Furthermore, there is also a need to repeat the message to achieve a considerable level of brand awareness in the target audience.

To come up with an ideal solution companies should deal with several reports in terms of ratings, budgets, broadcastflowand those reports are interrelatedin the decision makingprocess.However, making such a hard decision with delivering lots of related reports consumes lots of time. Thus, minimizing time, increasing efficiency and reducing cost and also reducing the paper consumption is aimed to achieve during the decision process. To sum up AdsPlanner concentrate on the right audience, through right program and at an acceptable cost.

I.1 Mission of Project

Mission

The mission of the project is to develop an effective tool which provides companies with an effective solution that enables them to figure out most profitable alternative to position their TV commercials.

Goals

The main goal that the system aims to achieve is to find the optimum alternative for positioning TV commercials that maximizes the number of target audiences reached via TV comercials. Due to the needs of the decision maker, the return of commercial will be expressed in monetary terms.

Sub-goals

In fact; a system which only assigns commercials to the specific program intervals and channels does not give a significant decision to the decision maker. It has to achieve more than assignments of TV spots to the commercial breaks.

One of the sub-goals that we plan to achieve with this system is to find a solution that achieves the main goal of the system while it also maximizes the number of people that sees the commercial among the target audience. In other words; the system will take into consideration to reach the target customer while generating a solution to the decision maker. In order to make a right definition of the target audience; we give the opportunity to client company to define the basic characteristics of its target audience during the plan creating process Based on these data, the system will generate its analysis including best available commercial breaks for target customers.

Another sub –goal is to find the best solution which uses advertising budget of the company most effectively while meeting other requirements . To stay within the budget limitations of the company while finding optimal solution is one of the critical concern of this system.

Objectives

AdsPlanner focuses on reaching the right audience, at the right time, through right program and at an acceptable cost. The aim of the system is generating effective and efficient tool that is in line with the company’s strategies. Objective of AdsPlanner is finding the optimum solution by reaching as many members of the target audience as possible within specified budget.

I.2 Users and Analysis of Decision

Decision

It is a fact that, TV advertisements are one of the most effective and efficient tools of advertisement industry. However, although it is useful, it is one of the most expensive ways of advertising. For this reason, companies which want to give TV advertisements have to use their resources effectively. AdsPlanner helps decision maker to reach the highest numbers of target audiences with the little amounts of budgets.

On the other hand, there are some other factors affecting the decisions. First of all, ads should be watched by targeted people, in order to generate higher return. Namely, there may be many different audience profiles and they may change time to time. Any product also has its different target consumers (besides some exceptions) and these consumers may be one of the target audiences of TV watchers. To reach the target customers, placing ads in right time intervals is a significant issue.

Secondly, most of companies may see advertisement more than a tool for selling a specific product or service. They may use it also for prestige of the company and they may want to use ads in order to be remembered, or to create a public awareness about their company. Then, they may want to show their ads not only in the most optimal time intervals but also they may want to show them several times in a day in different periods. However in these different periods, also achieving to reach the most targeted audiences should be the main goal.

Decision Makers

Client company which wants to place a TV ad, should determine the budget that is allocated for TV ads, duration of TV spot and also the characteristics of the target audience.

Media Planning Company which is our main actor will determine on the optimum solution by using AdsPlanner.

AdsPlanner will combine the data that is collected from the company such as budget and target audience and Media Research Company for ratings in terms of numbers, and TV channel for the price and broad cast flow in terms of programs.

Scope

The proposed system is mainly used by the media planning companies in order to develop an advertising plan for client company in accordance with its marketing strategies. However this system will be designed specifically to give a support to company’s advertising strategies on TVs. Which TV program does the company request position for its ads, which time is the best available time for that specific company or product are the questions that will be answered by the system in a comparative basis. In addition to advertising strategies, this decision will be effective during the budget planning period of the company.

Period

Normally this is not a frequent decision for the company. In other words; company do not have to update his decision on how to give TV ads on daily or weekly basis. However; this decision can not be considered as an infrequent one which requires an update once a year.

Although the interval between periods changes depending on the sector that the company operated in, nature of the product/service and marketing strategies of the company; one month between two periods is a reasonable time interval to check out the former decision or make a new one.Because; distribution of ratings among programs and hence prices of categories are changed in a monthly basis; the advertising plan of the company can be changed depending to the changes of TV channels. In fact; AdsPlanner will develop a weekly schedule to be applied for one month; since TV Channels have weekly broadcast program.

At the end of each period; decision maker can compare the results generated by the system one month ago and real returns on the present day. In addition to this regular one-month-controls, decision maker can refer to the outputs generated by the system, whenever company markets a new product or service, or company wants to inform its target customers about itself like public offerings, joint ventures, successes, innovations, new developments etc.

Nature and Complexity of Decision

A company should carefully determine its target customers before it invests a lot of money to advertising. Because, if the company does not know who its real target customers are, it will never be able to gain any benefits from any kind of advertising. So, deciding for whom this product is for, is the most important decision in advertising.

After the company successfully determined the target customers, it should deal with the other issues, such as advertising budget. It is obvious that the boundaries of an advertising plan is mostly determined by the advertising budget that the company can allocate. Actually, budget constraint is the real reason why we are preparing such a decision support system. Because, if the company had unlimited budget, decision would not be a real problem since the company could be capable of showing its advertising to any customers and at any time.

When our advertising budget is determined, AdsPlanner will decide when and how frequently publish its advertisings in order to reach its target customers.

The client company should also decide on the length of the advertising spot. Because; it the ad is not attractive and effective then it leads people to change the channel. What is more, if the ad is long in duration then the budget will be spent unnecessarily. Therefore; the client company should carefully decide on the duration of the ad beside the content of the ad.

Bottlenecks and Constraints

As mentioned above a company should consider lots of constraints such as budget and target customers. But these are internal constraints. Namely, these constraints are directly related to the company. But, as well as those internal constraints there are several external constraints that the company should take into account, such as legal and ethical issues in advertising. There are regulations regarding to the number of allowed advertising in a specified period and to the content of the advertising. Company’s advertising content and duration must fit into those constraints. Moreover, the price of a TV ad and ratings are variables in terms of the dynamic dimensions of the business.

Current Level of Goal Attainment in the Existing System

In todays media sector or specifically TV sector, TV programmes are categorized such as Top Pt which represents Evening News. In addition to the categories D TV grouping: to illustrate Ozel refers to soap opera or K9 refers to reality shows etc. Those groups have different price. The programmes depending on their ratings have prices. To illustrate, for Evening News the price is approximately 500.000YTL per second. Price per second is determined by the TV Channel on the basis of ratings that comes from Media Research Company. If the ratings are high then the price of an advertisement automatically increases. (Appendix 1.2)

Cost per point/second which is the abbriviated as cpp/sec, is the price per second depending on the “rating” issue. (Appendix 1.1)

For instance:

A program:

Rating: %3,5

Price per second: 60 YTL

Cpp/Sec =60/3,5 =17,14

Once the company`s related department determines on the budget that is allocated for TV ads and the target audience, media planning company determines on the scheduling depending on the budget and also target audience.

While placing a TV ad, the right target audience is also important for the companies. Audiences are categorized according to gender, age, geographic and socio-economic factors, person who is responsible from the shopping activity, family size and work status. Those categories play an important role while scheduling a TV ad. (Appendix 1.1). For instance, razor blade ad should be placed into evening programmes or soap ad during the K9 type of programme (Sabahların Sultanı) to reach more target audience.

Sensitivity of the Decision To Certain Input Parameters

Due to the higher numbers in terms of the payments in the media sector, the cost of a wrong decision will be higher. The client company is the major party that is tend to be influenced by the critical decisions. Once an erroneous decision is made, the negative effect will be on the budget of company.For instance, wrong reports about Cpp/sec or a wrong estimation of a budget can dramatically decrease the budget of the company or reaching the target audience can ended with a failure.