Advertising & Ad Campaigns

Advertising is how your station sells airtime. A campaign holds what was agreed — the advertiser, the flight dates, how many spots a day, which hours they may run in and the rate — and owns the audio that carries it. Everything else in Studio schedules music; this is the only thing that schedules an obligation.

The workflow is four steps: tag the audio, decide where breaks fall, book the campaign, send the proof.

Step 1 — Get the advert into your library

An advert is ordinary audio, so it starts in the Media Library. Upload the file the way you upload anything else. Studio reads its length and loudness on the way in, and the length matters later: it is what decides how many spots fit in a break.

Then tag it. Open the file and set Kind to Advertising (paid spot).

That one setting does more than label the row. Advertising is the only kind in Studio that no blind pull can reach — not a folder pull, not a playlist, not a smart rule. It airs through a campaign or it does not air at all. That is what keeps a paid spot inside the dates it was sold for and on the report the advertiser is invoiced against.

Advertising or Promo? Use Promo for your own trails — a show, a competition, an appeal. Promos still air from a clock the way they always have. Use Advertising for a third party's paid spot.

Tagging a whole flight at once

If a client sends six cuts, do not open them one at a time. On the Media Library, tick the rows — or use Select all to take everything a filter matches — then choose Advertising (paid spot) from Set kind and press Tag. Studio confirms before applying, because tagging rewrites what a file *is*.

Step 2 — Decide where breaks fall

There are two ways, and they work together.

Station-wide breaks (no clockwheel needed)

Go to Settings → Ad breaks. This is the path that needs no programming at all: a station that has never built a clock can still carry advertising.

• Open ad breaks automatically — on by default. Nothing airs until a campaign is running, so it is safe to leave on.
• Breaks at (minutes past the hour) — up to six, comma separated. 15, 45 gives two breaks an hour. Leave it empty to use only the ad break slots you have placed in a clock.
• Longest break (seconds) — how much of the hour one break may spend. Three minutes by default. A break stops once it has spent this much.
• No ads from / until (hour) — a quiet window in your station's local time. 0 to 6 means no advertising between midnight and six. The range may cross midnight, so 22 to 6 is one window, not two. Clear both to run advertising around the clock.

An Ad break placed in a clock

If a break belongs somewhere exact — after the news, before the travel — open Clocks, add a slot and set its kind to Ad break. The number beside it is how many spots that break may carry.

Which one wins

A clock that carries its own ad break takes over for the hours it runs. The station-wide times stand aside, because placing a break in a clock is you saying where the break goes.

A clock with *no* ad break slot still gets the station-wide breaks. That is deliberate: otherwise scheduling a show over a live campaign would silently stop its advertising.

Step 3 — Book the campaign

Open Advertising and press New campaign. Easy mode is five fields:

1. Advertiser — who it is for. This is the name that appears on the proposal and the report.
2. Runs from / to — the flight, in your station's own dates. Both ends are inclusive.
3. Spots per day — the booked quantity.
4. When — a daypart preset: Any time, Weekday breakfast, Weekday drivetime, Weekday daytime, Evenings or Weekends. One click.
5. Rate per spot and Currency.

Everything else has a working default, so a first booking takes about fifteen seconds.

As you type, the line under the fields works out what the booking actually delivers against your real break times:

45 airings across 15 days, every day, 06:00 to 24:00 — USD 2,250.00

It is the same arithmetic the proposal uses, so the number you quote and the number you print cannot disagree.

Advanced

• Most spots in one hour — the hourly cap, 1 by default. Two spots from the same advertiser inside one hour is the complaint, not the sale.
• Contact email — appears on the proposal.
• Days and Hours — the exact grid, if a preset is not quite right. Touching either switches When to Custom.
• Notes for the proposal — free text that prints on the terms page.

Status

You set Draft, Active, Paused or Ended. Only Active campaigns are ever selected.

The label on the list row is derived from the dates rather than stored — *Scheduled* before the flight starts, *On air* during it, *Finished* after — so it can never go stale.

Step 4 — Attach the audio

In the campaign, press Add copy. The picker shows your library filtered to the kind you choose: Advertising, Promo or Jingle.

Attach several and they rotate: least recently played first, ties broken by the order you set. An advertiser with three cuts hears all three in turn rather than the same one every time. There is no randomness — A, B, C, A is what a client expects.

• Disable pulls a cut off air but keeps every airing it has already had on the report.
• Remove takes it out of the campaign entirely. What already aired stays reportable either way — you cannot delete your way out of an advertiser's evidence.

If you attach a Jingle or Promo, Studio warns you: your clockwheel's "any jingle" slots can also play that file, and those airings will not appear on the advertiser's report. Tag it Advertising to keep it campaign-only.

How a spot is actually chosen

Worth knowing, because it explains everything the pacing bar shows.

Every question is asked about the moment the spot will air, in your station's timezone — not the moment it was chosen. Selection runs a track ahead of air, so counting off selection time would drift a spot into the wrong hour's tally.

A campaign is eligible when all of these hold:

When several campaigns qualify, the one furthest behind its booking goes first. That is what makes spots per day a promise rather than a hope — under-delivery corrects itself instead of the earliest riser eating the day's inventory. Rate breaks the tie.

The same advertiser never airs twice in a row.

When a break carries nothing

A break is stepped over in silence — no filler, no dead air — whenever nothing is owed a spot. It is also refused outright when:

• a live or relay show is on. The presenter owns the audio, so a spot chosen there would be logged and heard by nobody.
• a pinned slot is due, or is less than a minute away. News is never made late by an advert.
• a show is about to start and the spot would not fit before it.

Step 5 — Watch delivery

The bar on each campaign row is the thing to keep an eye on: delivered against booked, and how far behind the campaign has fallen. Under-delivery is the failure nobody notices until the advertiser telephones, so it is on the screen you already have open.

Studio also warns you about bookings that cannot physically work, at the moment you save them rather than at the end of the month:

• Spots per day that exceed the permitted hours multiplied by the hourly cap — it tells you what it *can* deliver.
• An hourly cap higher than the number of breaks the station opens.
• No copies attached, so the campaign will never air.
• Every copy longer than the break is capped at.
• Every permitted hour falling inside the no-ads window.
• No permitted weekday inside the flight dates.
• Spots that were selected but never confirmed on air by the playout node.

Step 6 — Prove it

Three documents, from the buttons at the foot of the campaign.

Airing report (CSV) — every spot that actually went out: the date and time in *your* timezone with the zone named in its own column, which copy ran, how long it was, which break it ran in, which show it sat inside, and how many people were listening. Only confirmed airings appear. A spot your playout node never reported as started is not proof of anything, so it is left off.

Delivery summary (CSV) — the reconciliation, one row per day of the flight plus a total: booked, delivered, shortfall, value booked, value delivered and impressions. This is the one to attach to an invoice.

Proposal (PDF) — the document you send *before* any of it happens. Your station name on the cover, what the advertiser gets, where the spots land hour by hour, and what it costs. It is generated from the live campaign every time you open it, so it never quotes a figure you have since changed.

Troubleshooting

My spot is not airing. Work down the eligibility list above. The commonest causes, in order: the campaign is still Draft; today's or this hour's cap is already used up; the hour is not in the campaign's daypart; the hour is inside the station's no-ads window; the clock running now has its own ad break and the walk has not reached it yet.

The ad break slot in my clock is skipped. That is what a break with nothing owed looks like — the same way a talk break with no voice track queued is stepped over. Check the campaign's hourly cap: if a spot has already aired this hour, the slot correctly waits for the next one.

A campaign shows spots I cannot see on the report. Selected is not aired. The report counts confirmed airings only; the campaign page shows the unconfirmed count separately so you can tell the difference.

Everything is tagged and nothing airs at all. Check Settings → Ad breaks is on and has at least one break minute, or that a clock in the schedule carries an Ad break slot.

Limits

• Up to six station-wide break times, each between fifteen seconds and ten minutes long.
• Spots per day between 1 and 200; hourly cap between 1 and 60.
• A flight may not run longer than 400 days.
• Campaigns count against your plan. A trial includes one, which is enough to build a real booking and generate the proposal.