This article explains how to use advertising scheduling in mAirListDB, either by importing traffic logs from external software, or buy using the (simple) built-in scheduler.

Advertising will be scheduled using the Mini Scheduler, so we assume that you have followed the Music Scheduling tutorial, and have hour templates set up as as required. At that point, you will be able to add advertising breaks to your hourly schedule.

The first step is to decide about the (maximum) number of advertising blocks/breaks you will have per hour, and set up the block accordingly. Open the mAirListDB app and go to Administration → Advertising Setup, which will bring up the following dialog:

First, adjust the number of available blocks (per hour) as required. We currently support up to 16 blocks per hour, which should be more than enough for most purposes.

Thereafter, select a block from the list on the left, then edit its properties:

• On the General tab:
  • The Name of the block; it will appear in the scheduler dialogs, and is also being used as default for the title of the resulting container playlist item.
  • The Source can either be the internal scheduler, or one of up to 8 different file import sources (when working with external scheduler). We will describe both methods below. Note that you can set the source individually for each block, so you can actually mix internal and external scheduling within one hour (e.g. use internal scheduling for promos, and external scheduling for the actual advertising).
  • The Regionalized content option is only relevant for import sources; it will create Region Containers by importing multiple traffic logs, or for each region, at the same time. See comments below.
  • If required, specify an Opener and Closer item that will be played at the beginning and end, respectively, of this ad block.
  • The Block number alias can be used to tweak import filenames, see below.
  • The Projected time setting is used when exporting campaign information for the internal scheduler, see below. You can set it to the minutes/seconds of the hour when the block is usually played.
• On the Container tab:
  • When Always create a container is enabled, the Mini Scheduler will always use a container to wrap the items of the ad block, rather than adding them individually into the playlist, even if not explicitly requested by the hour template item. This option must be turned on if you are going to use the Update Advertising function.
  • You can also adjust the Title, Artist, Type and Color to be used for the container playlist ist.

Once you have set up all blocks as required, you can continue to add them to your hour templates.

Go to Administration → Manage Templates and edit your hour templates. In the list of the available template items on the left, you will see one named Advertising. Drag one or more of these into the desired positions:

Double-click each item, and select the corresponding block (see above) for this ad break:

We strongly recommend that you use containers for all advertising blocks; but rather than setting the container options on the Settings tab in this dialog, you should check the Always use a container option the advertising block setup (see above), to make the Update Advertising function work.

Once you have added the ad blocks to your hour templates, you can re-run scheduling to create new playlists with the ad blocks included. They will initially be empty - now it's time to fill them with content.