A key task of advertising media planners is to determine the best media schedule of advertising exposures for a certain budget. Conceptually, the planner could choose to do continuous advertising (i.e., schedule ad exposures evenly over all weeks) or follow a strategy of pulsing (i.e., advertise in some weeks of the year and not at other times).

This paper by Professor Prasad Naik and co-authors Murali Mantrala and Alan Sawyer from the University of Florida offers a model that shows pulsing strategies can generate greater total awareness than the continuous advertising when the effectiveness of advertisement (i.e., ad quality) varies over time.

This paper won Naik the 1997 Academy of Marketing Science Dissertation Award and the 1998 Frank Bass Award for the best dissertation-based paper.