I was invited yesterday to talk to a group of Radio Broadcasting students at my old college. I'm in a role that doesn't get a lot of exposure when people talk about radio, or media in general: Traffic. When someone hears that I work in radio, and that I'm the Regional Traffic Manager, their first assumption (understandably) is that I'm referring to the road. Traffic jams. Accidents. That sort of thing.

But that's not the case. The Traffic department is responsible for the scheduling of commercials on the on-air logs. They get merged with the music programming (or TV, but I've never worked in TV so can't speak to their challenges and responsibilities), and that's how you get a daily program log that goes to air at 00:00 and ends at 23:59:59 every day.

Here's a more official-sounding definition of the role, according to Wikipedia:

In broadcasting, traffic is the scheduling of program material, and in particular the advertisements, for the broadcast day. In a commercial radio or TV station there is a vital link between sales (of advertisement or commercial space) and traffic in keeping the information about commercial time availability.

If you wanted to boil the role of "Traffic Coordinator" to a single paragraph, that sums it up very well. To boil it down even further to a short elevator pitch, you might simply say that it's about inventory management for a radio station.

I could end this article right here and now, but I think it might be worth the time to read just a little bit about the role of a Traffic Coordinator, or in my case, a Traffic Manager.

Daily Routine

A day in the life of the Traffic department is highly structured, at least it is in the environments in which I've worked. We have a set time for transferring the logs¹ every day, and thus a set of deadlines for other departments to follow to allow us to meet that daily deadline. That individual deadline informs so much of our day.

Reconciliation

We start the morning by reconciling the previous day's (or weekend's) log. Reconciling means that we compare the log that we transferred to the automation system with the on-air log spit out by the same automation system to tell us when these commercials (here-on referred to as "spots") ran. Our traffic software has a handy script that we run that automatically compares the two playlist files so that we don't need to do this spot-by-spot.

The result we get depends on how the day went. More often than not, there are no issues. Occasionally we get a set of spots known as "irreconcilable"; this means that they didn't air for whatever reason. It's our job to investigate - did these spots truly fail to air? Sometimes there are problems with the automation system and we discover that they did air but maybe somewhere else. If they didn't go to air, why didn't they? There are a myriad of problems that could cause a spot not to air, and the first step is sending out a simple fault report email and the applicable departments will answer.

This investigation of missed spots doesn't change our course of action - either we can make it good (schedule it on an upcoming log), or credit the spot (remove it from the order, thus causing a loss of revenue). But finding out what happened to the spot is important, because there is the potential - depending on the problem - that it's the source of an ongoing issue that needs to be fixed sooner than later.

In all, the reconciliation process probably takes 5 minutes per log, max. If there are larger issues it can definitely balloon to bigger times but that's rare.

Processing Orders

The sales reps sell ads² to advertisers, and they input orders into the traffic system. The time between reconciling the previous day's log and sending the next day's log is spent checking over orders in the system waiting for us to process. The workflow looks like this:

1. Rep enters order and marks as Ready for Approval
2. Sales Manager reviews the order, and approves it
3. Traffic reviews the order at the final stage; if any revisions are needed it gets sent back to sales, otherwise Traffic processes the order.

We are looking specifically for orders that affect the next day or so, but we are also looking at orders in general. We go over orders at this time because of the fact that they sometimes affect immediate commercial logs, as well as future logs - which we are going to be working on later in the day. Some days this part of the process takes longer than others. Some days are significantly shorter than others, in which case we can often work ahead.

Transferring the Commercial Log

This is a very short part of the whole process. When we are ready to transfer the log (for us it's usually 1pm), we check it over one last time to make sure we haven't missed adding any spots to the log, and that there is no missing creative. When we're sure that it's ready to go, we run through the verify/finalize process and send it off. Done.

Log Editing

The time after sending the log is usually spent editing future logs. Usually we are at least one day ahead, meaning that if it's Monday, we probably have the Wednesday log already edited and we're working on Thursday. Since we are sometimes able to work ahead as mentioned earlier, we could be even further ahead. Either way, this is usually a much quieter period in the day, less frantic.

And that's the basic daily routine.

Who We Work With

In Traffic, we work with all of the other departments in radio:

• Sales
• Creative/Production
• Programming
• Engineering

We work the most often with Sales, Creative, and Programming; Engineering is who we go to when something goes wrong with the stations and we're trying to figure it out. They're the ones that tell us about anything gone awry before we find out about it. So while we don't work with them as often as the other departments, they're still very important to us.

Sales

Without the sales reps, we wouldn't have anything to put on the traffic logs. Plain and simple. I don't think there's much more I can say about that; I wager sales departments are rather similar across the board no matter what industry they're in.

Creative/Production

The actual producers of the spots that we schedule. We depend on them most especially when it comes time to transfer the commercial logs every day. They will let us know if there are any problems with specific advertisers and whether or not we should expect to move them to another day. Sometimes they get the head's up about a new order coming before it even comes across our (virtual) desks.

We get the orders into the system, Creative gives the spots a number, and Production (after producing the spots) upload the audio to that number. It all meshes together in the automation system to play out of your speakers.

Programming

You know, come to think of it I think instead of a triangle of Sales/Creative/Traffic, we form a square. Maybe a diamond if you want to make it look nicer. The four departments rely on each other to put an audio product on the air.

When it comes to Programming, they are the department that tells us how much inventory we have. Do we have 4-minute stopsets³? 2 minutes? None at all for special programming? The two departments have to also make sure that our two logs match; if we have a break at 3:20pm, should it be there, or at 3:25pm? If they don't line up, it could mean some lost spots.

And sometimes we'll get asked for special programming. We have some coming up; what that means is we need to match what they're asking for. Often it's for an hour to run commercial-free, but we've had special talk show programming for election night coverage on some of our news stations. It's never exactly the same every time.

Major Issues

As I alluded to there are sometimes various issues that cause us a little bit of grief from time to time. The range is quite broad, from minor (a stopset is missed because of a timing issue) to major (a widespread power outage takes out a station for days). Quite simply - there's not much we can do until we get confirmation of what happened and what's affected. Once we have that, we can start the clean-up. It's pretty much the same as when we reconcile a log: make-good what we can, credit the rest.

Format flips - when a station changes from one genre to another (such as Pop to Country, or Pop to Rock etc.) - are another particular challenge. This is again where we liaise with programming leading up to the change. More often than not this is also something held confidential to a small circle of people, so there have been cases where I (as a manager) am aware of an upcoming change that my team has not been until it's officially announced. This is primarily to avoid leaks to the public about potential changes, which can have damaging effects to the brand or company; but also because occasionally people are sometimes laid off so you don't want people to find out before they are let go. It can be a cruel industry.

And more often than not, any change is last-minute, because radio is seen as a rather immediate business. Unlike a newspaper, things can be reported as soon as they happen, and advertising can be switched up almost as quickly, also unlike a newspaper; if there's a misprint in an ad, you can't change it until the next day. Want to change what sale you're advertising? Most of the time it can be done within a few hours! This is probably the greatest challenge - how quickly we need to be able to pivot.

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While I feel that a lot of this looks like an in-depth look at the role the Traffic Department plays in radio, I also feel like I'm scratching at the surface. There are many other things I haven't covered here - one of the biggest things we deal with is accuracy in billing, so that revenue can be collected properly, and that we don't make mistakes when billing and have to refund money. All sorts of things like that. To really get a sense of what we do in the department, you either need to spend some time shadowing someone (which can be boring, if it's a regular, nothing-special-happening week), or get hired in Traffic.

And that's actually a pretty cool thing; sure I went to school for Radio Broadcasting, and it can be helpful to have a background in media, you don't actually need any formal training for the role. If you're detail-oriented and a quick learner, you can pick it up rather fast. The lingo might take a little longer to get used to, but that's really the learning curve. Many people in this department stay on for the long haul; I've been in the same line of work for almost 20 years. Other people have been in the business far longer than that. And other people use the role as a jumping off point into another department, since we touch on all the major players in the building.

It's interesting once you get into it, even if it is hard to explain.

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1. We used to call it printing, when we actually printed a small phone book's worth of paper. We don't do that anymore, but we occasionally still call it printing. Sort of like how you still "hang up" the phone, even though that cathartic action is taken away from us by a button.↩

2. More accurately they're selling airtime, which is associated with demographics. They're selling an audience.↩

3. A "stopset" is what we call a commercial break. Programming "stops" for a "set" of commercials. I don't know if that's exactly what that term refers to but it works in this case.↩