How to build a media plan

What media planning is

Media planning is deciding how an advertising message reaches a defined audience: which channels to use, when to run the activity, how much to spend, and how the result will be measured. Its output is the media plan, the document that allocates a budget across channels, placements and periods. It answers four questions: who to reach, where, when, and with how much. A media planning strategy explains why these audiences and channels were chosen; the plan records the budgets, the timings and the measures.

A complete media plan contains at least the objective of the campaign and how it will be measured, the audience and the media where it can be found, the channels and placements chosen, the calendar, the budget by channel and by period, and the indicators used to monitor it. The message and the creative direction come from the communication plan; formats are agreed with the creative team, according to the placements chosen.

What a media plan is for, and what it is not

A media plan exists to allocate an advertising budget according to the campaign’s objective, and to be able to say afterwards what each channel delivered. Without a shared plan, channels are managed against separate targets and dashboards, and overall campaign performance becomes difficult to assess.

It is not the communication plan. The communication plan sets the brand’s message, audiences and objectives for a given period: what to say, to whom, and why. The media plan is its translation into media: where, when, at what cost. A good media plan does not reinvent the message; it organises its distribution.

It is not media buying either. Buying is the negotiation and booking of space with publishers and platforms. The plan guides those purchases and then serves as the reference for checking what was delivered.

The media planning process in five steps

1. Set the objective and its measure. Awareness, consideration, sales, sign-ups: one objective per campaign, and one indicator that matches it. Separate at this stage the outcomes you will observe directly (a number of orders, store sales) from the ones you will estimate (the reach of an out-of-home campaign). Decide too how you will assess the share of those outcomes caused by the advertising: with an experiment, or with a model. The distinction saves many arguments when the campaign is reviewed.

2. Define the audience and find it in the media. Who needs to see the message, and where can those people be reached? Describe the audience by its characteristics and its behaviour, including which media and devices people use and when they use them. Use that to estimate reach (the share of the audience exposed to the campaign) and frequency (how often those people see it).

3. Choose the channels and placements. The media mix combines the channels chosen to reach the audience and meet the campaign objective within budget: search, paid social, online video, out-of-home, radio, television, print and partnerships. Four criteria for each: reach of the audience, cost per contact, the context the message appears in, and measurability. The channel that reports the best results is not always the one that contributes the most, because each platform measures on its own and they often count the same sales.

4. Allocate the budget and set the calendar. This is the heart of the media plan: how much on each channel, in which period. The calendar accounts for seasonality, commercial peaks and the pace of the creative work. Every budget line carries an assumption about its return, and every assumption carries its source: measured on your past campaigns, modelled, or taken from a benchmark. Writing the source down now is what makes the review honest.

5. Plan the monitoring and the adjustments. A media plan is not a document you file once it is approved. Set a review schedule suited to the length of the campaign, often weekly, the thresholds that trigger an action, and what you will do if a channel falls behind: reallocate budget, pause a channel, run a test. Plan the tests that can check the assumptions behind the plan, and note the ones that will remain uncertain.

Media plan template to download

The template is a spreadsheet, with no form to fill in. It covers the five steps in three tabs:

• Plan: one row per channel and period, with the audience, the objective, the placement, the budget, the expected volume, the success indicator and the source of the assumption (measured, modelled, benchmark).
• Channel assumptions: each channel’s expected return, its evidence source and a proposed test to check it.
• Example: the fictional split of the next section, with its source per channel, the proposed tests and the schedule in three waves.

The download link is at the bottom of this page.

A worked example

The example is fictional: an online cosmetics brand launches a new range in France over twelve weeks, with a media budget of 120,000 euros. The campaign aims to generate online sales, measured by the number of orders containing products from the new range.

Channel	Role in the plan	Budget	Share	Basis of the return assumption (fictional)
Paid search	Capture the demand created by the other channels	€36,000	30%	Measured on the brand’s past campaigns
Paid social	Make the range known to the audience	€36,000	30%	Measured for the channel, to be confirmed for the new range
Online video	Establish the message before launch	€24,000	20%	Benchmark, the brand has never used the channel
Digital out-of-home	Make the range known in the areas the audience frequents	€12,000	10%	Benchmark
Partnerships and creators	Credibility with the audience	€12,000	10%	Assumption, a test is planned

The campaign runs in three phases: four weeks of video and out-of-home before launch, four weeks with every channel active, and four weeks of search and social to sustain sales. The weekly review covers spend and orders of the range. Each channel’s cost per order is computed with an explicit attribution method, and read separately from the estimate of the orders actually caused by the advertising.

The table says where the money goes. It does not say whether the split is right, and that is the next question.

How much budget per channel: what the template does not settle

A spreadsheet records an allocation. It does not say whether the 36,000 euros on paid social would have returned more on video, nor at what point a channel stops paying back. Answering takes suitable data or benchmarks, and a method that states its assumptions and its uncertainty.

The method starts from the return on the next euro. A channel’s return follows a curve: beyond some point, each additional euro returns less, until saturation. Allocating a budget means comparing channels on the return of their next euro and directing spend towards the highest expected return, allowing for uncertainty and for the constraints of each channel. Marginal incremental ROAS measures the additional revenue caused by an additional euro of spend; the response curve of each channel shows how that incremental revenue changes with spend.

When the brand has enough history, those curves are estimated with a media mix model. When it has none for a channel, like video in the example, the plan starts from benchmarks, provided you know where they come from: an audited benchmark registry beats a figure copied from a deck. In both cases, an experiment, a geographic test for instance, measures what the advertising actually added rather than what the platforms attribute to it. Data-driven media planning makes that evidence explicit, including the assumptions that still need testing.

The media planner’s role

The media planner is the person who does all of the above. From the brief, they define the audience, choose the channels and placements, split the budget, set the calendar, then monitor the campaign and adjust it. Depending on the organisation, they negotiate with publishers themselves or coordinate with the people who buy the space; on the brand side, they often steer agencies and platforms.

Their media planning tools are often a spreadsheet plus each platform’s dashboard. The hard part is not building the plan. It is keeping the plan current, reconciling figures measured on different bases, and knowing when to adjust it. That holds for digital media planning, which covers the online channels, and for omnichannel media planning, which coordinates online and offline activity: a plan revisited once a year stops reflecting reality as soon as costs, results or objectives move.

Data-driven media planning: what the Media Planner changes

The Kuwalyst Media Planner is media planning software built on one idea: every figure in the plan says where it came from. It starts from what you have today. Without first-party data, the plan is based on your brief and on the audited benchmark registry, and it prioritises the tests that will let your own measurements gradually replace the benchmarks. With a data warehouse and a media mix model, allocations follow the marginal return shown by the response curves, rather than an average return.

Plan, Operate and Tune form one loop: build the plan, monitor the campaigns and adjust the allocations in the same workspace. Goals are monitored weekly, and the adjustment recommendations show their confidence and the evidence behind them. You choose between three autonomy levels: auto-pilot within limits you set, one-click approval, or a manual review of every action.

Agencies can license it for their clients under their own brand: see white-label marketing science for agencies. Brands can run it themselves or have the Kuwalyst team operate it. In both cases, the plan, the models and the evidence remain yours.