How Flight Status works in TAP with time zones, reporting, and delivery

TAP is built on the concept of delivering advertising at a station’s local time zone. So if a flight is scheduled to run on Monday from midnight to midnight, it will run during that time relative to each targeted station’s time zone. This is simple enough if a your flights run under a single time zone, but it can be get complicated if there are stations that cross time zones. For example:

A flight targets two stations in the United States, one in New York and one in Los Angeles. They are to run on Monday, from midnight to midnight.

• The New York station delivers impressions from midnight to midnight in the eastern time zone (EST; UTC-5).

• The Los Angeles station delivers impressions from midnight to midnight in the pacific time zone (PST; UTC-8).

Since the time zones are three hours apart, this means that the flight didn’t just run for 24 hours; it ran for 27 hours because delivery in the PST zone ran until midnight PST, which is 3:00AM EST.

This can be confusing when running reports. Triton's reporting is set to universal time (UTC). So if you run a report for those two stations, you would not only need to account for the UTC time zone difference, you would also need to account for the fact that the impressions ran for more than the 24 hours defined in the flight's date range.

One of the ways that Triton accounts for timezone differences between when a flight delivers in different locations and how it is reported is that we keep the flight status as "active" for a 48-hour buffer on either side of the flight's date range. The flight isn't necessarily delivering during these buffer zones, but it is "active" despite the fact that these times appear to be outside of the set date range.

This is why you might see a flight's status as "Active" when its date range has not yet begun or has already ended. In the diagram below you can see how a flight scheduled to run for 24 hours can actually be active for 120 hours because of the timezone differences and the leading and trailing buffers.