What a good media plan actually does.

Most media plans are spreadsheets of placements. The good ones are documents about audience and intent. The placements fall out.

A bad media plan starts with the budget. The budget gets divided across channels using a logic that is half historical, half political. Last year’s split, adjusted for what the team thinks should grow. The placements get loaded into the spreadsheet. The plan is the spreadsheet.

A good media plan starts with the audience. Specifically, with a description of what the audience is doing in the hours and days before the buying decision. Where they are physically. What they are searching for. Who they are talking to. What they have already considered and rejected. The description is not a persona document. It is a behavioral one.

The plan then identifies the channels where the audience is reachable in those moments. Not the channels where the audience exists. The channels where the audience is reachable in the relevant window of intent. The distinction matters because the audience exists in many places where the message will not register.

The placements come last. Once the audience description and the intent windows are nailed down, the placement decisions become mechanical. This channel matches this window. This format matches this attention level. This frequency matches this consideration cycle. A senior strategist can do the placement layer in a few hours because the structural decisions are already made.

The reason most media plans are spreadsheets is that the audience-and-intent work is harder to staff. It requires research the team has often not done, judgment the team has often not earned, and willingness to defend choices the team has often not taken. The spreadsheet is faster. The spreadsheet is also why most paid media campaigns underperform.

A good media plan is forty pages. The spreadsheet of placements is two of those forty pages. The other thirty-eight pages explain why the two are correct.

Most agencies present the two pages and call it a media plan.

It is not.

It is the appendix.