WHAT A WEEK...

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. It's been a crazy 5 days filled with last minute campaigns, revisions, late creative, radio campaigns booked, postponed and rebooked, and hundreds of submissions for regulatoy approvals.

We are all looking forward to the holiday weekend break!
Have fun. Take some time to relax. Enjoy your family. Sleep in. Eat some junk food.
Next week we'll talk about paying Talent.  Now doesn't that just put the "f" into fun....

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!

Thanks for reading our blog. xo

ACCELERATED DEADLINES

Next Monday is Family Day in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan and Louis Riel Day in Manitoba and Islander Day in PEI. For a lot of people in Canada, it’s a statutory holiday.

I think one thing we’ve made clear so far is that for the traffic department, deadlines are essential.  As explained in an earlier post (HOW WE ORGANIZE OUR WEEK) the standard traffic deadline is the Wednesday before the intended air date. 

So, what happens when those much-anticipated long weekends finally appear? 

Family Day is our first yearly dose of accelerated logs and deadlines.

When we are working within a short week, the term that gets thrown around is “accelerated logs”.

This means that the stations are working a day ahead (in general) of their normal schedule to ensure that all commercials are locked into place before the long weekend arrives. For agency traffic folks like us, this means that we also need to work a day ahead of schedule.

Normally we would be gearing up to send material/instructions out on Wednesday for a Monday airdate, but everything gets bumped up to Tuesday to meet accelerated deadlines.

So all the creative and information for TV traffic departments will need to be sent out tomorrow…oh. I’ll have to wrap this up quickly, I suddenly have a lot to do!

To some, one day doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it can have quite an impact on our week. Stations are often quite strict with early deadlines and it is essential that we all work together to ensure everything is done in time so that we can all relax and sleep in on those extra days off.

HELP!

Look at the sad number of people following our blog.
Stop being a creeper!
Please sign up to follow our posts. We often think of Traffic as one of the most "thankless" jobs...
Having you follow our blog will feel like a big giant virtual hug!

AD AGENCIES

Did you know there are different kinds of agencies? Did you know there are agencies that specialize in Print Advertising, Digital Advertising, or niche groups such as those in the Medical Profession?

In this post, that's not what I'm going to talk about.

For our purposes in Broadcast Traffic there are 3 types of agencies we deal with:

FULL SERVICE- These agencies write and produce the creative. They have an account service department working with the client, a planning department deciding what type of media to buy and a buying department responsible for booking the media time.
AGENCY OF PRODUCTION- These shops only make the creative product. They rely on other partners to plan and buy the media.
AGENCY OF RECORD- Plans and buys the media only.

In a situation where we traffic commercials for an AOP or AOR we don't have all the resources under one roof, and we use our detective skills to seek out the info we need.
Here are a few vital questions that are addressed:
Will we be required to obtain regulatory approval numbers? If yes, we can review scripts and give feedback and red-flag any potential issues.
Are we aware of upcoming radio and TV campaigns? Only if we have blocking charts from the planners, we can then remind our partners of upcoming deadlines.
Is there talent to pay? We can handle that as well by providing declarations to our creative partners.
We can also give our station friends the info of who to contact with media discrepancies if we are not the buying agency.

To add to the fun, some of our partner AOP and AOR agencies are in different time zones. Just last week I was trafficking a campaign for a client who's creative was being produced in Australia. Due to the time difference it would take 2 days to get a response to every question!

That's just how it goes in this profession, every situation is different.  I guess this is one reason why we are called Traffic. And we don't even need the hat, white gloves and whistle to make sure the traffic flow is kept moving!

ADVERTISING FUN FACTS!

10 random facts about advertising courtesy of www.randomhistory.com

Though the commercial “1984,” which launched the Apple Macintosh computer, ran just one time on American television, during the Super Bowl, it has had a lasting impact on advertising. Directed by Ridley Scott, the commercial was the first example of “event marketing,” or when a promotion deserves as much coverage as the product itself.

More than $500 billion a year is spent on advertising worldwide

In a national survey, more than half of the children who responded reported that buying certain advertised products made them feel better about themselves

Ronald McDonald was first introduced in 1963. In 2010, the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International argued that the clown has hooked kids on unhealthy food for nearly 50 years, creating an epidemic of diet-related diseases

Researchers report that women’s magazines have 10.5 times more ads and articles promoting weight loss than men’s magazines do, and over 75% of women’s magazine covers include at least one article title about how to change a woman’s body by diet, exercise, or cosmetic surgery

Before the printing press, advertisements were often vocal announcements. The invention of the printing press in 1440 ushered in the advent of modern advertising

A new study finds that the best strategy for advertisers trying to persuade a skeptical audience is to leave out facts and focus more on emotional ads. On the flip side, it found that those who are less skeptical are more persuaded by more information-based ads

Doyle Dane Bernbach’s “Think Small” ad for Volkswagen at the end of the 1950s is considered particularly brilliant because it took a German car initially created for Hitler and successfully sold it to post-war Americans

Interpublic, WPP, and Omnicom Group are the top three largest advertising companies in the world

Prerecorded advertisements became possible in 1956 with the invention of videotape recording

PERHAPS WE SHOULD TURN THE TV OFF BETWEEN COMMERCIAL BREAKS...

HAPPY SUPERBOWL SUNDAY!

Here are some fun facts by way of our DG/FASTCHANNEL friends:

	Of the top 10 most watched television programs of all time, 9 of them are Super Bowls
	The Super Bowl has seen its international audience grow  by 7% since 2003. Clearly, as the international audience for the Super Bowl expands, so does the game itself
	With an average global audience of over 100 million, the Super Bowl is second only to the European UEFA Champions League final (that's soccer for all you American football fans.)
	The Super Bowl has been televised in as many as 230 countries, and translated into as many as 33 different languages
	The first two Super Bowl games were called "The AFL- NFL Championship Game". The third Super Bowl was called Super Bowl III, and the name stuck
	In the early days, Super Bowls generally featured college and high school marching bands for the halftime show. (This year, Madonna will perform a 5 song set-list, with a little help from Nicki Minaj and LMFAO)
	According to the USDA, Super Bowl Sunday is the "second highest day of food consumption in the United States, after Thanksgiving"
	8 million pounds of guacamole and 14,500 tons of chips are eaten on Super Bowl Sunday
	Over 700,000 footballs are produced annually for official NFL use, and 72 of them are used in the Super Bowl
	Sales for next year's Super Bowl (CBS) have already begun

FABULOUS PRIZES TO BE WON!

A contest for our loyal blog readers…

Correctly answer this clever math/reading comprehension-hybrid question to win a gift basket assembled just for you by the Mediabrands Traffic Department!!

How long (in kilometers) was the longest recorded traffic jam in the world?

Subtract the number of hours a station needs to make creative changes.

Then add the number of characters in a commercial ID number.

Comment with your final answer…we'll randomly select a winner from all the correct responses and that lucky duck will win the gift basket and the eternal respect of his or her colleagues.

COMMERCIAL ID CODE NUMBERS

Every radio and television commercial that we produce is identified by its very own I.D. number. Each ID# is unique and belongs only to the commercial for which it is issued.

We use a 12 character ID number format and a lot of information is packed into that little code.

Here’s an example:

HEFTY JOINTS is our client and the maker of Premium Widgets.  We’ve produced their first new spot of the year, a new 30 second tv commercial.

The spot would get this ID#:  HJPR0012T30E

From this code, we can determine the client, product, number in sequence of spots produced, calendar year, medium, spot length and language.

Here’s how it breaks down:

HJ = HEFTY JOINTS

PR = PREMIUM WIDGETS

001 = the sequential number of spots produced in a calendar year – in this case it was #001, or the 1st commercial produced this year

2 = the year- in this case 2012. For all commercials produced this year, the number sequence will end in “2” for 2012

T = it’s a television spot. A radio spot would have an “R” instead

30 = it’s 30 seconds in length

E = English

Some stations add “dashes” to break up the number/letter sequences, thus making the ID# easier to read:  HJPR-0012-T30E

While understandable, this can cause problems when station invoices are being matched and cleared through our media system.

Invoices are cleared electronically using the commercial information we provide, so an I.D. number with dashes won’t match.

Also, a dash is an additional character that takes up a space within the media system’s 12 character limitation, and every dash added crowds out the letters and numbers at the end of the I.D. number, leaving our billing group with incomplete information.  This causes a lot of delays for a lot of really busy people and can result in delayed payment to our media providers (the tv/radio stations).

So, to answer a question from one of our blog readers: “to dash or not to dash?”. 

“Please, no dashes!” is our response.