GENERATION AND APPROXIMATION OF REACH AND DISTRIBUTION OF FREQUENCIES.

Media planning has heretofore been restricted, by and large, only to the consideration of average frequency. A recently developed mathematical model explicitly considers both cumulative duplicating audiences over a variety of time periods and the simultaneous selection and scheduling of media. This model thus required the development of methods for handling such nonlinear concave aspects of audience characteristics within a linear programming model and for generating distribution of frequency data within the computational processes of the model. This is done by means of logarithmic transformations and, for the discrete distributions of frequencies, by log-normal approximating devices. Each of these two techniques is important in its own right as a type of method which may be employed in a wide variety of modelling or computational situations. Thus, because neither of these techniques is restricted to the area of media planning per se, it seemed worthwhile to present them on their own terms. (Author)