A weapon-target assignment approach to media allocation

An important problem which media planners face with is media allocation including budget allocation for an advertising campaign in an optimal frame. This study developed a near optimization model, originated from the weapon-target assignment problem of military operations research, that allocates both media and budget. The proposed model, which is independent of the duration of an advertising campaign, also schedules advertisements during the day. The presented model is an integer nonlinear programming problem. A hypothetical example is given and solved by MS Excel as a powerful spreadsheet tool. MS Excel's Solver is also proposed to solve NP-complete type problems. This study is a good example of military operations research models that can be adapted to contemporary business world applications. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.