Delivering guaranteed display ads under reach and frequency requirements

Abstract

We propose a novel idea in the allocation and serving of online advertising. We show that by using predetermined fixedlength streams of ads (which we call patterns) to serve advertising, we can incorporate a variety of interesting features into the ad allocation optimization problem. In particular, our formulation optimizes for representativeness as well as userlevel diversity and pacing of ads, under reach and frequency requirements. We show how the problem can be solved efficiently using a column generation scheme in which only a small set of best patterns are kept in the optimization problem. Our numerical tests suggest that with parallelization of the pattern generation process, the algorithm has a promising run time and memory usage.