The Traffic Manager at an advertising agency is responsible for delivering ad campaigns from idea generation to completion.
This role must manage.the ever-changing, fast-moving priorities of an ad agency by balancing time and resources to produce advertising.
According toCampaign Live, major responsibilities of a Traffic Manager are:
- Manage daily schedules
- Allocate resources
- Monitor and report status
Overall, traffic managers are experts in time and project management to provide client deliverables on schedule and as-specified.
Customer Success Managers are challenged with delivering our output to customers as well.
We can use techniques from Advertising Traffic Management to get ideas on managing our schedule. Let’s review.
Manage Daily Schedules:
- What we may do: As CSMs we may focus on what’s urgent on our schedule, the customers that are speaking up the most or what we feel like doing.
- What we can do: We can make an effort to manage our daily schedule. For example, we can look at systems for time management, make decisions about how we will allocate our time and think about the implications of our time management strategy such as finding ways to do the urgent as well as the important yet not urgent.
Allocate Resources
- What we may do: We may be overly ambitious or unrealistic about our capability to get things done with the resources we have. As Oliver Burkeman recaps in the time management book Four Thousand Weeksour time is limited and the more we understand it the better choices we can make: “embrace the truth about your limited time and limited control over that time…by stepping more fully into reality, you get to accomplish more of what matters.”
- What we can do: We can consider the landscape of items we must do and decide how to apply our resources. Like a business that must use its resources to be profitable we can make choices about where we will invest our time. As Oliver Burkeman says we can focus on making decisions with our time “consciously and well.”
Monitor and Report Status
- What we may do: We may feel overwhelmed by the number of tasks we’re responsible for. As an outcome, we may fall behind with keeping track of what needs to be done and where things stand.
- What we can do: We can carve out time in our day to track what’s new, regroup on what needs to be done and reassess our plan. We can check status and decide if we’re on top of our schedule or see what’s slipping we may need to address. Knowing what needs to be done and where things stand can make us a valuable resource to our customers and colleagues.
CSMs operate in a fast-moving environment like our advertising counterparts. We can use strategies like planning our day, allocating our resources and monitoring status to help deliver outcomes to our customers.