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A flat flight spends evenly from start to end. Pacing periods shape it instead: a heavy launch week, a quiet middle, a holiday push. You describe the flight as dated periods, each with a relative weight or an explicit budget, and at launch every staged media buy splits into one package per period.

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The schedule

A schedule has 1–52 periods. Periods must sit inside the flight and can’t overlap. Gaps are allowed: leave a pause out of the periods rather than weighting it 0. In budget mode the period budgets can’t add up to more than the campaign budget.

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How budgets resolve

  • Weight mode splits the budget by days × weight. In the example, Launch gets 7 × 3 = 21 shares, Sustain 14 × 1 = 14 and Holiday push 9 × 2 = 18.
  • Budget mode uses the amounts as written.
Amounts are rounded to cents, and the last period absorbs the rounding. Reads return every period with its resolved budget.

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Set it on a campaign

Pass pacingPeriods to save_campaign on create, or on an update with expectedRevision. An update sends the full schedule; null clears it. The result’s pacingApplicationNote says how many draft buys will use the schedule (”… will use this schedule the next time the campaign launches; live media buys are unaffected.”). Over REST, pass the same field on POST /api/v2/buyer/campaigns and PUT /api/v2/buyer/campaigns/{id}.

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Per media buy

update_media_buy (or PATCH /api/v2/buyer/media-buys/{id}) also takes pacingPeriods, replacing the campaign’s shape for that one buy. It’s stored on a draft or pending buy and used at launch.

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At launch

Each staged buy splits into one package per period per product. Each package covers its period’s dates and carries pacingPeriod (index, one-based, and label). In weight mode a product’s budget splits by days × weight; in budget mode each period’s budget is shared across products in proportion to their budgets. A campaign launched mid-flight skips periods that have already ended, and their share goes to the periods still ahead, so each product keeps its full budget.

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Changing a schedule after it starts

A period that has started is locked:
  • it can’t be changed or removed (”… has already started, so it can’t be changed or removed.”), and the schedule can’t be cleared;
  • the mode can’t change once any period has started;
  • every period can’t be in the past: a schedule needs at least one period still ahead.

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Appending periods to a live campaign

On a live campaign, adding periods to the end of the schedule, with the existing ones unchanged and in order, is pushed to its paced buys as new packages. The update returns a pacingCascadeResult: A buy whose seller doesn’t support adding packages to a live buy is unsupported. In weight mode, an appended period keeps the buy’s current spend rate per weighted day.