Product exclusions
Product exclusions regulate the bookings of products and the relation to other products. In general these product exclusions are set up for products within a company. The exclusions are supposed to prevent from booking rival products of a company in the same break.
Product exclusions are especially needful for bookings by agencies via Online Client, because only the breaks that are bookable without violating existing exclusions are displayed to the user.
Attention: exclusions that are not maintained properly significantly narrow the available inventory (the bookable breaks) for a campaign. It´s not recommended to create exclusions on branch level. Example: smartphone of company A is not allowed to be booked in the same break as smartphones of competing companies. In this case the schedulers of competing companies can only place spots in breaks that are not booked by company A.
Creation of product exclusions
- Creation of a validity and linking it to the product exclusion
- Definition of the maximum number of spots per break that can be booked in one break (1 = one more product of the advertiser can be booked additionaly per break)
- Allocation of products that are affected by the exclusion
- Definition of the booking rule (hard lock = the system doesn´t permit violations of the exclusion or soft lock = the system generates warning messages in case of violations, but bookings are allowed)
General data
- Name - name of the product exclusion
- Type - the user can create exclusions on 3 different levels: product exclusions on product level, on product families and on advertisers. Once an exclusion is used in bookings, the type cannot be changed anymore.
- Number - this field determines the maximum number of identical products/ product families/ advertisers that are allowed to be booked in the same break. If the maximum is exceeded, the exclusion is considered violated.
- Booking lock - if the checkbox is not marked, the system generates warning messages in case the exclusion is menaced to be violated, although booking would still be possible. If the checkbox is marked, it is not possible to place bookings that would violate the exclusion.
- Product type - once a product type is selected, the exclusion refers to product types. That only makes sense if product types are maintained in the product data records.
- Various - the exclusion refers to the number of products/ advertisers that was entered in field 3.
- Various products - exactly one booking of the product/ advertiser per break is allowed
- Media Combi - allocation of the media combi the exclusion should be applied in
- Validity - once an exclusion is saved the system generates a validity-data record. By clicking the folder-button the data record can be opened and edited. The validity determines the time and period of the allocated data sets. Validities can be linked to various data records.
- Depending on the selected type in field 2, various data sets can be selected in this grid:
- Type = Product Level: selection of products. The selecion list containes the products of all advertisers
- Type = Advertiser Level: selection of advertisers
- Type = Product Family Level: the selection grid is not visible
Reports
In this tab possible violations of the product exclusions are displayed. That provides the users with the possibility of identifying those bookings that violate the exclusion and to rebook them into other breaks.
Violation of hard exclusions
When trying to place a spot with a product that is the subject of a hard exclusion, the user a receives failure message. The booking cannot be completed.
Hint: the view of the disposition or optimizer should be refreshed after each booking on suborders with hard exclusions on the allocated products. Those breaks that are booked with the mentioned products will not be visible anymore after refreshing the view, which makes it impossible to accidentally trying to book the same breaks again.
Violation of soft exclusions
Soft exclusions allow the user to finish bookings that violate the exclusion. Those breaks that are already booked with a product of the exclusion are displayed shaded. On mouseover a warning is displayed that the exclusion will be violated when booking the selected product in the break.