The buy is the plan

A media plan is built backwards from two numbers, and neither of them is in the strategy.

The first is the budget the client has. The second is the money the agency needs the account to make. Everything between them is a mix that reconciles the two, and most of that mix is settled before anybody has written a sentence about the audience. The strategy pages come afterwards, to explain the mix.

I built plans that way. So did every planner I have worked with, and in January, when the annual number lands and the plan is due in three weeks, there is no version of the process that runs in the other order.

For years I thought that was the flaw in agency planning. I was wrong about which part deserved the anger.

The buy is honest. A flighting chart, a channel split, weights by month and by market, a reach curve, cost assumptions. It says exactly where the money goes and what it is expected to return, and it admits its own compromises, because a spreadsheet cannot hide a line with no money on it.

The strategy pages are the part that flatters. They were written after the decision, so they never lose an argument. They can carry three audiences the buy never touches, a funnel with a stage nobody bought, and an important role for a channel that got two per cent.

The real flaw is that the client reads the strategy and signs the buy. The annexe goes round the room unopened. Nobody asks why the second market has a quarter of the weight of the first, or why the last six weeks of the year are empty, or which lines moved when the budget was cut by a tenth and the fee stayed where it was.

The buy is the plan. Everything in front of it is a cover letter.