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Broadcast Scheduling for Mobile Advertising

London Business School, Regent's Park, London NW1 4SA, United Kingdom
London Business School, Regent's Park, London NW1 4SA, United Kingdom
bdereyck{at}london.edu
zdegraeve{at}london.edu

We describe a broadcast scheduling system developed for a precision marketing firm specialized in location-sensitive permission-based mobile advertising using SMS (Short Message Service) text messaging. Text messages containing advertisements were sent to registered customers when they were shopping in one of two shopping centers in the vicinity of London. The ads typically contained a limited-time promotional offer. The company's problem was deciding which ads to send out to which customers at what particular time, given a limited capacity of broadcast time slots, while maximizing customer response and revenues from retailers paying for each ad broadcast. We solved the problem using integer programming with an interface in Microsoft Excel. The system significantly reduced the time required to schedule the broadcasts, and resulted both in increased customer response and revenues.

Subject classifications: Marketing, advertising and media: mobile marketing; Production/scheduling, applications: advertisement broadcast scheduling; Integer programming, applications: IP solver interfaced with Microsoft Excel.
History: Received February 2002; revision received January 2003; accepted January 2003.