STUDIO
What you make and decide
The spreadsheet, replaced properly.
Plans, insertion orders, line items, release orders, spend tracking and reconciliation, with approvals before anything commits. Built for teams who already run media seriously.
What Media Planning is
Media Planning replaces the planning spreadsheet with something that holds its structure. A plan contains insertion orders, which contain line items. Release orders go out against them. Spend is tracked against plan and reconciled, with variance visible rather than discovered at month end. Multi-level approvals sit before anything commits money, and destructive actions carry a confirmation. Programmatic activation is supported. It is deliberately built for people who already know what an IO is.
The problem
The plan, the actuals and the invoices never agree.
Media planning survives in spreadsheets because spreadsheets are flexible, and dies in spreadsheets for the same reason. The plan gets copied, three versions circulate, someone edits the wrong one, and the version the agency is working from is not the version finance approved. Then actuals arrive in a different shape, reconciliation becomes a manual join, and variance is found weeks after it could have been acted on.
What you get
The structure it holds
Plans and orders in one structure
Plans, insertion orders, line items and release orders, the actual paperwork behind a media buy, rather than a spreadsheet that four people have their own copy of.
The real artefacts
Spend tracked against the plan
What was committed, what was released and what actually went out, continuously, rather than assembled at month end.
Continuous
Reconciliation
The gap between planned and actual visible while you can still act on it. That gap is where media budgets are quietly lost.
Visible early
Approval before anything commits
A chain that is enforced rather than advisory, because this is the step where money actually leaves.
Enforced
In practice
Plan, released, actual, in one structure
Approve, activate, release and delete each carry an explicit confirmation, and the approval chain is enforced rather than advisory. This is the step where money actually leaves.
Coverage
What it covers
| Object | What it does |
|---|---|
| Media plan | The container: period, budget, objectives, status |
| Insertion order | A commitment to a publisher or platform, against a plan |
| Line item | The specific buy: placement, format, rate, quantity |
| Release order | What is actually released against an IO |
| Spend record | Actuals, tracked against committed |
| Programmatic | Activation for programmatic buys alongside direct |
Where it connects
What it connects to
- Budget Planner answers how much and where, before a plan is built.
- Audience Intelligence supplies the segments and audience lists the buy is aimed at.
- Ads Manager runs the platform side of the plan on Meta, Google, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
- Analytics reports delivery against plan, so variance has somewhere to land.
Read next
Going deeper on this
Questions
Media Planning, answered
Is this for brands or agencies?
Both, and the organisation model supports an agency running several client brands with separate access per brand.
Does it replace our finance process?
No. It gives finance a consistent structure to reconcile against instead of a folder of spreadsheets.
Can we import existing plans?
Yes, via spreadsheet upload. Most teams start by bringing in the current quarter.
Does it handle programmatic?
Yes, alongside direct buys, so a plan can hold both.
What about approvals across teams?
Multi-level approval is configurable, and roles determine who can approve what.
Bring your current media plan.
We will load it on the call and show you the same plan with structure, approvals and live variance.