Note: Competitive Separation is only available to Enterprise organizations. If you would like to upgrade your account, please contact support.

Competitive separation is an opt-in feature that prevents advertisements of the same category from running together in a downloaded episode. By default, Megaphone does not enable Competitive Separation within organizations. Meaning, orders inside Megaphone do not take into account the advertiser categories set on the Agency tab when determining what to run. 

To enable this feature, simply reach out to support and we can have it turned on within 2 business days (for Enterprise orgs only). Turning on competitive separation could result in underdelivery (as it will limit ads from placing together) so be sure to communicate internally with your org as well. 

If your organization flights an order for Bank A (with a category of Finance) and another order for Bank B (also with a category of Finance), both orders could run in the same episode download. Meaning Bank A could fill the first midroll, and Bank B could fill the second midroll. 

Because some advertisers want to prevent this behavior, Megaphone has created a competitive separation function that will honor advertiser categories set on the Agency tab and prevent matching advertisers from inserting into the same download.

If your organization flights an order for Bank A (with a category of Finance) and another order for Bank B (also with a category of Finance), both orders could run in the same episode download. Meaning Bank A could fill the first midroll, but Bank B will not fill the second midroll in the same episode. Both orders will not run in the same episode. 

Note that for competitive separation to function properly, advertisers must be categorized with a 1:1 perfect match via the Agency tab. 

Megaphone does make an exception to competitive separation if the exact same advertiser is targeting an episode. This is due to the intentional selling of a pre and midroll advertiser - trafficked as separate line items - that should be placed in the same episode. Therefore Bank A preroll and Bank A midroll can play in the same episode even though the have the same category.

If you are setting up a singular advertiser (Bank A) that you want to run in either the pre OR midroll spot but not multiple in the same episode (see use case 1), the workaround is to setup two different advertisers in Megaphone. In the Bank A example, setting up Bank A Pre and Bank A Mid advertisers with the same category will tell the system to treat them separately and apply competitive separation on an episode-by-episode basis. This is great for campaigns that need only one ad spot to run, but want them to rotate among the various ad locations.

As always, please reach out to support with any questions or to enable this feature.