Alternate messages are a powerful, flexible feature built-in to XStudio PostMajik. Alternate messages provide the ability to do such things as insert station promotional messages, provide generic music-related messages and devise custom marketing messages for specific advertisers linked to the playback of the advertiser's commercials.
Use of alternate messages is optional - see the topic Station Configuration for information on enabling or disabling alternate messages.
The content of alternate messages is maintained within each station's database in XStudio PostMajik. For details on creating and maintaining alternate messages for a station, see the Cart Categories & Messages topic.
Using Alternate Messages for Station Promotion
You can use alternate messages to promote station activities, including such things as special events, remotes, special programming or anything you wish to serve to enhance your station image online (with web billboards) or in the car (with RDS messages). As an example, you could create cart categories for jingles and promo's and associate a different set of messages for each with fine-tuning for dates the messages are allowed to air and message rotation for each category. Using this approach, you could do generic positioning statements or event-specific messages tied to specific days.
Using Alternate Messages for Advertiser Marketing
You may wish to enhance a particular advertiser's marketing plan by adding messages for text billboards and RDS messages that would be posted when the advertiser's commercial airs.
To set up alternate messages for a specific advertiser, create a cart category for that advertiser only and in the cart masks area, enter the specific cart number (or series of cart numbers) assigned to the advertiser. Then, create as many messages as needed for the category. You could for instance, set up messages to rotate based on dates - a message valid only one or two days during a sale. In this way, you could increase the urgency by setting up messages for things like "the sale ends tomorrow" or "the sale ends today".
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XStudio PostMajik searches for a matching category (the cart number matches one of the cart masks in the category) in alphabetical order of the category names that have been defined for the station. If you happen to have a cart number that fits into two categories, based on cart masks, it will always be associated with the category found first alphabetically. You should use this approach to create a special category for a commercial client who's cart number also fits in a defined "Commercials" category. The special advertiser category would be named in such a way as appear in the category list ahead of the "Commercials" category so it is found before the more generic "Commercials" category. You can use an exclamation point (!) at the beginning of the category name, for instance, to force the category towards the top of the category list. |
Using Alternate Messages for the Music Category
If a station has alternate messages enabled, consider adding generic music-related alternate messages for the Music cart category. If a song is started and it does not exist in the music database, the fallback is to use an alternate message from the music category to cover the post. While song-specific information will not be posted, the alternate message posting could be a music positioning statement, for instance, rather than the web site you're posting to or RDS encoder displaying out-dated information.
Alternate Message Rotation
Cart categories can have multiple category alternate messages, each with its own valid start and end date. When XStudio PostMajik determines an alternate message is to be used, the last-used alternate message in the category is located as a starting point. From there, XStudio PostMajik steps to the next message to see if it is valid for the day. If so, it is used and marked as last-used. If not, XStudio PostMajik steps through the rest of the available messages until if finds one that is valid for the day and marks it as last-used. When the last category message is reached, XStudio PostMajik loops around to the beginning of the list.
