Media Planning

Media Selection
Media selection applications of linear programming arc designed to help marketing

managers allocate a fixed advertising budget to various advertising media. Potential media
include newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and direct mail. In these applications,
the objective is to maximize reach, frequency, and quality of exposure. Restrictions on the
allowable allocation usually arise during consideration of company policy, contract
requirements, and media availability. In the application that follows, we illustrate how a
media selection problem might be formulated and solved using a linear programming
model.
Relax-and-Enjoy Lake Development Corporation is developing a lakeside community at a

privately owned lake. The primary market for the lakeside lots and homes includes all
middle and upper income families within approximately 100 miles of the development.
Relax-and-Enjoy employed the advertising firm of Boone Phillipps and Jackson (BP&J)
to design the promotional campaign.
After considering possible advertising media and the market to be covered, BP&J
recommended that the first month's advertising be restricted to five media. At the end
of the month, BP&J will then reevaluate its strategy based on the month's results.
BP&J collected data on the number of potential customers reached. The cost per
advertisement, the maximum number of times each medium is available, and the
exposure quality rating for each of the five media. The quality rating is measured in
terms of an exposure quality unit. A measure of the relative value of one
advertisement in each of the media, this measure, based on BP&J's experience in the
advertising business, takes into account factors such as audience demographics (age,
income, and education of the audience reached), image presented, and quality of the
advertisement. The information collected is presented in Table 1.
Relax-and-Enjoy provided BP&J with an advertising budget of $30,000 for the first
month's campaign. In addition, Relax-and-Enjoy imposed the following restrictions on
how BP&J may allocate these funds: At least 10 television commercials must be used, at
least 50,000 potential customers must be reached, and no more than $18,000 may be spent
on television advertisements. What advertising media selection plan should be
recommended?
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The decision to be made is how many times to use each medium. We begin by defining
the decision variables:
DTV = number of times daytime TV is used

ETV = number of times evening TV is used
DN = number of times daily newspaper is used
SN = number of times Sunday newspaper is used
R = number of times radio is used
The data on quality of exposure in Table 1 show that each daytime TV (DTV) advertisement
is rated at 65 exposure quality units. Thus, an advertising plan with DTV advertisements will
provide a total of 65 DTV exposure quality units. Continuing with the data in Table I, we find
evening TV(ETV) rated at 90 exposure quality units, daily newspaper (DN) rated at 40
exposure quality units, Sunday newspaper (SN )rated at 60 exposure quality units, and radio
(R) rated at 20 exposure quality units. With the objective of maximizing the total exposure
quality units for the overall media selection plan, the objective function becomes
Max 65DTV + 90ETV + 40DN + 60SN + 20R Exposure quality

We now formulate the constraints for the model from the information given
DTV ≤ 15
ETV ≤ 10
DN ≤ 25Availability of media
SN ≤ 4
R≤ 30
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1500DTV + 3000ETV + 400DN + 1OOOSN + 1OOR ≤ 30,000 Budget
DTV + ETV ≥ 10 Television

1500DTV + 3000ETV ≤ 18,000restrictions
1OOODTV + 2000ETV + 1500DN + 2500SN + 300R ≥ 50,000 Customers reached

DTV, ETV,DN, SN, R ≥ 0
The optimal solutions to this five-variable, nine-constraint linear programming model

is obtained using excel; a summary is presented in Table 2.
The optimal solution calls for advertisements to be distributed among daytime TV, daily
newspaper, Sunday newspaper, and radio. The maximum number of exposure quality units
is 2370, and the total number of customers reached is 61,500. The Reduced Costs column in
sensitivity report indicates that the number of exposure quality units for evening TV would
have to increase by at least 65 before this media alternative could appear in the optimal
solution. Note that the budget constraint (constraint 6) has a dual price of 0.060. Therefore, a
$1.00 increase in the advertising budget will lead to an increase of 0.06 exposure quality
units. The dual price of -25.000 for constraint 7 indicates that reducing the number of
television commercials by1will increase the exposure quality of the advertising plan by 25
units. Thus, Relax-and-Enjoy should consider reducing the requirement of having at least 10
television commercials.
A possible shortcoming of this model is that, even if the exposure quality measure were not
subject to error, it offers no guarantee that maximization of total exposure quality will lead to
maximization of profit or of sales (a common surrogate for profit). However, this issue is not
a shortcoming of linear programming; rather, it is a shortcoming of the use of exposure
quality as a criterion. If we could directly measure the effect of an advertisement on profit,
we could use total profit as the objective to be maximized.
Page 3 of 3

Media Planning

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Media Selection

Media selection applications of linear programming arc designed to help marketing

Relax-and-Enjoy Lake Development Corporation is developing a lakeside community at a

DTV = number of times daytime TV is used

Max 65DTV + 90ETV + 40DN + 60SN + 20R Exposure quality

DTV + ETV ≥ 10 Television

1OOODTV + 2000ETV + 1500DN + 2500SN + 300R ≥ 50,000 Customers reached

The optimal solutions to this five-variable, nine-constraint linear programming model

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