The Walt Disney Company
Techniques for generating promotional plans to increase viewership

Abstract:

In one embodiment, a promotional subsystem generates promotional plans that include promotionals, where each promotional targets one or more pieces of scheduled content. First, the promotional subsystem generates a statistical model based on historical respondent viewership data. The statistical model model maps a respondent viewing of a promotional that targets a piece of scheduled content to a probability of the respondent viewing the piece of scheduled content. Subsequently, the promotional subsystem generates a proposed promotional plan based on the statistical model, a schedule that includes the piece of scheduled content, and a risk tolerance. Advantageously, the promotional subsystem may be configured to generate different proposed promotional plans based on different risk tolerances associated with different viewership growth strategies. Automatically generating proposed promotional plans based on probabilities reduces the time required to identify an acceptable promotional plan compared to current techniques that generate a single promotional plan based on deterministic strategies.