Glossary A–ZLetter A
Advertising inventory
Advertising inventory is the total of all ad slots that a network operator or sales house can sell in a given period.
It is expressed in slots, seconds of airtime, ad plays or impressions. All bookings are served from this stock.
A network with fifty screens, twelve operating hours a day and a sixty-second loop with six ad slots has, by calculation, 216,000 possible ad plays per day. Slots for the operator's own content and blocked times are deducted from this. The remaining inventory is offered broken down by site, venue type and time of day.
Inventory is perishable: a slot that is not sold today cannot be sold tomorrow. Operators should manage their inventory in one place so that direct sales, sales houses and automated trading do not allocate the same slots twice. Screen outages reduce the inventory that can actually be delivered and should be allowed for in planning.