How billboard double bookings happen, and how to stop them
Billboard double booking is almost always a hold nobody confirmed. How it happens, and what stops it: one calendar, derived availability, expiring holds.
A billboard double booking usually happens because a hold was never confirmed or released, and the only record of it sat in one person’s head or diary. To avoid double booking, keep one calendar everyone reads, work availability out from confirmed bookings, and give every hold an expiry date. The first check is to list every face that is held but not confirmed and see how many have a date on which the hold lapses.
Here is how it plays out, and what fixes it.
Every media owner has had this call. A client rings to confirm the Gangapur Road site for next month, you say yes, and somewhere in the back of your mind a small alarm goes off. You check. It was held for somebody else in March. You said yes to both.
Nobody talks about this one, because it feels like carelessness. It usually isn’t.
The hold that was never confirmed
Here is the actual sequence, and it is the same one almost every time.
A client asks you to hold a face. You do — in your head, in a diary, in a message thread. He says he’ll confirm by Friday. Friday passes. He doesn’t confirm and he doesn’t release it either, because releasing it costs him nothing and he might still want it.
Meanwhile a second client asks for the same month. You either turn him away for a booking that never materialises, or you take him and hope the first one has gone quiet for good.
Both outcomes cost money. The first is a lost sale you will never see recorded anywhere. The second is the phone call.
Why a diary cannot solve it
The information exists. It just lives somewhere only one person can reach.
A booking diary is a record of what was decided, not a system that answers a question. When your salesman is with a client and needs to know whether the College Road face is free in November, he cannot consult a notebook in your drawer. He rings you. If you don’t pick up, he guesses — and a guess is exactly how a face gets sold twice.
The problem gets worse with scale in a way that is not linear. Fifteen structures with two faces each is thirty sellable things across twelve months: three hundred and sixty face-months to keep straight, most of them in one person’s head.
How to stop double bookings
- Keep one calendar that the salesman, the office and you all read at the same moment, not one person’s calendar shared on request.
- Work availability out as what is left after the confirmed bookings. A free-or-booked column maintained by hand is wrong within a week, and wrong when you are busiest.
- Give every hold an expiry date. When it passes, the face opens again by itself and appears in your available inventory.
- Record who held the face and when, so the awkward call can be answered from the record: “you asked on the 3rd and it lapsed on the 10th”.
- Today, list every face held but not confirmed, and chase or release each one.
The part that is not a software problem
None of the above stops you saying yes to two people. It only stops you doing it by accident. Discipline about confirming holds is still yours. What a system removes is the class of error where everyone acted reasonably on the information they had, and the information was wrong.
In Sazinga AdBoard availability is derived from live bookings on one shared calendar, so the same face cannot be sold twice, and a hold carries an expiry that releases the site when it passes. It is one of several failures that running an outdoor media operation produces when the inventory only exists in one person’s memory.
Related: how many days did your sites sit empty, which is the same problem seen from the other side — inventory you had and did not sell. If you are weighing up tools for this, what billboard management software actually needs to do sets out how to test a system for exactly this before you pay for it.