What Is a Traffic Manager, and Why Should Your Agency Have One?

The average agency can be a hectic place, with multiple teams working on everything from media plans, social media posts, creative strategies, website builds, to page layouts. A Traffic Manager ensures that all work from the account service team flows efficiently to the creative and production departments, then back to the account service team and out for an agency’s clients to review (and hopefully love).

A Traffic Manager’s job centers around three primary responsibilities:

1. Deadlines
   Who has time to keep an eye on all deadlines? A Traffic Manager’s job is to make sure all deadlines are met, and if it’s not possible, the Traffic Manager will check with account service for a possible extension or re-assign work to another creative to meet a deadline requirement. 
2. Schedules
   Traffic Managers use sophisticated project management software to keep a list of jobs within an agency and their deadlines up to date. A big part of the Traffic Manager’s job is to make sure the team spends more time developing creative and meeting other client needs, and less time worrying about coordination and other internal processes.
   The Traffic Manager also works closely with Creative Directors to assign work to the most appropriate designers, based on skill and familiarity with the project, which helps control time spent on jobs to ensure budgets are kept in check.
3. Status  
   The Traffic Manager typically conducts a weekly status meeting to go over all jobs in production with both the creative team and account executives. This responsibility includes checking in on a project’s status to ensure nothing has fallen through the cracks and that things are moving smoothly. Traffic Managers are also often the person responsible for generating status reports and recommending process improvements.

Trafficking is a critical part of an agency’s internal workflow, ensuring that magic happens smoothly by managing the agency’s internal processes. An agency’s clients might never see the Traffic Manager working behind the scenes, but should know that a dedicated Traffic Manager had a big part to play in every piece of creative and every project delivered on time and to spec.

Want to learn more about the internal processes at Texas Creative? Check out a few of our other blogs here.