wicks visual traffic advice

[dkocolin]

I recently took over as traffic director at my college station.At the end of our :19 break, we play an SPA-A promo to promote another show on the station. Until this year, they were on carts, so rotation basically took care of itself.Now we've converted to all-digital, and in our Dalet we have A-1 through A-20.We have Visual Traffic set up to rotate through the promos, but our current set up seems be doing a poor job. Basically we have an excessive amount of each promo for the day scheduled, and have VT fill them in. It'll be OK for a few hours, then the same 2 or 3 promos will rotate for the rest of the day and I have to do it by hand, which is tedious to say the least.Does anyone else have this setup with a better solution? We could schedule the promos to only go in certain times, effectively scheduling it separate for each time we want it to appear, but that would only get messy as promos came and went.The other idea is setting something up in the Dalet to have the person just drop "A Promo" into the set, and the Dalet picks which one to play.Any ideas?

 

[another_guy]

This would depend on your automation software....

But with promo's instead of having the traffic system handle the rotation we let the automation software do it. In others words, wicks schedules one cart, lets say its cart 2000, well 2000 will actually rotate other carts that I place inside 2000. We use simian as our automation software, and its really easy to set this up. Just click on "create new rotating cart", you can make certain promo's only play at certain times or certain days, you can put kill dates so the wrong promo doesn't run past its kill date, and its really easy to take out and put in new promo's.

The only time we let wicks handle the scheduling of promo's is if its a sponsored promo and the client needs to see how many times it plays, but for station promo's letting the automation software handle it, works great