A simultaneous ascending price auction ("SAA") can be used to allocate advertising inventory to bidders. The advertising inventory can be, for example, radio or television advertisement spots ("spots"). The bidders can be advertisers that can provide advertisements for presentation in the spots. Two or more contiguous spots can define an advertising block. Spots or advertising blocks can be allocated to advertisers by the SM mechanism based on bid criteria. The SAA can perform simultaneous advertisement scheduling and pricing. The auction allocation can be optimized to facilitate efficient allocation of advertisements to spots or blocks.