How do I merge my commercials into M1?

On each master clock, you add Special units named “Spot Break for Merge”. You add one of these for each and every spot break in the hour. You place the Spot Break For Merge units at the proper positions on your clock, then you tell each one where to look on the commercial log to find the spots that belong in that break.

Your traffic/commercial scheduler has its own ‘skeleton’ format clock with commercial breaks/avails positioned where you want them in the hour. You just need to get M1 coordinated with that log.

Now, let’s say you have commercial breaks in the traffic software at :10, :20 and :45 minutes past each hour. You will then add 3 ‘spot break for merge’ items into each M1 clock. You place them at the appropriate places on the format clock. Then, in the Properties window of each item you tell it the “nominal” start time. That means for the :10 break, you tell M1 to bring in the spots that it finds at :10 in the traffic log.

Important: the Nominal start time on the item in M1 must be entered in minutes/seconds. So the first commercial break would have nominal start time displayed as: 10:00….not, :10

The Spot Break For Merge units will also ask for a Length when you first create them. The default is 3 minutes, but you can change it. This is only for display on the clock at the beginning of the new log; so you get a visible pie-slice 3 minutes in size. As soon as the commercials are imported, the size of the format clock pie-slice will adjust to the actual amount of content. So, if the :10 break in the first hour has 2 one-minute spots, you’ll get a 2 minute pie-slice. If the :10 break in the next hour has 4 minutes of commercial time, you’ll get a 4 minute pie-slice when the commercials are imported.

M1 needs to be told how to read the commercial log that it will be importing. This is a one-time set-up thing. Each commercial scheduler creates a text-file log which is in most cases what is imported by the digital automation unit. M1 reads that same file. Standard import formats are already installed for most of the widely used commercial schedulers in the US and UK; Darts, Broadnet, CBSI, Visual Traffic, etc. We add new import interfaces as they are needed at no charge to the user. However, there is a function built into M1 that allows anyone to custom-create their own import, too. We’ve had some stations that create their commercial log with non-traditional software, generate a text-log with that and then have it imported into M1.

Why merge the commercials into M1 when my automation system can do it?

It’s good to import the spots into M1 because then you can see exactly how much content you have in each and every hour, eliminating the need to over-schedule every hour with a couple of extra songs that usually don’t get played but which are there only because you need to have ‘fill’ material in the short or light-commercial hours.

You already know the format clock pie-slices for songs adjust to the length of each song. If you import spots, then the format clock segments for the commercial breaks will also adjust in size to the amount of content within them. Two minutes worth of commercials gives a 2-minute pie-slice. A four minute commercial break gets a 4-minute pie-slice.

If the hour is over-scheduled, M1 shows you the overflow (as additional pie-slices) on the left of the screen. If the hour is under-scheduled, you get white-space at the end of the clock. Also the total content is displayed numerically at the bottom of the scheduling window. So, with the spots and the music hour fully scheduled, you can click through the hours and clearly see where you need to drop or add content to get closer to a precise 60 minute hour. You won’t have to keep scheduling so many songs that are never going to be played.

Another reason to import spots is that you can move the units around as you like. You can change the order of the spots within each break. You can move spots from one break to another, too.

When you finish with the next day’s log, you can export a full-merged log to your digital system. Or, you can export the log without the commercials and then let your automation system do the final merge as you’ve been doing in the past.