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!