Media Plan

The Media Plan is where Skeleton Key turns Strategy into an executable channel and spend plan. Unlike Research or Strategy, it is a single unified document rather than a set of agent outputs. Three sections sit on the same page, all views into the same plan:

1. Overview: campaign label, strategic focus, budget, dates, duration, and problem statement.
2. Charts: a five-stat summary strip plus five visualizations of how the plan's budget is distributed, with cross-filtering between charts and Plan Details.
3. Plan Details: seven tabs (geo, flighting, channels, audiences, URLs, goals, pillars) where the actual plan data lives.

What it produces

A single Media Plan document with the three sections above. The plan exports to Excel and Markdown. A Source link in the page header points back to the upstream Strategy run, alongside the request name, created/updated timestamps, and any attached Documents. See Exports & sharing for format-specific behavior.

Attached documents are read the same way as in Research and Strategy: one run reads about 600,000 characters of text, a trimmed file is reported on the plan page, and a run that stops on its documents tells you why. There is no rerun action on a Media Plan, so after a document problem you start a new plan. Standing rules on the Guidelines page take precedence over attached documents. See Documents.

How it fits in the workflow

The Media Plan is always campaign-scoped. It requires a completed Brand Profile, a Campaign brief, a completed Research run, and a completed Strategy run on the same campaign.

The full dependency order is: Brand Profile → Campaign → Research → Strategy → Media Plan. Each phase becomes available once the previous one is complete. The product enforces this automatically.

Refining and version history

The Media Plan is read-only on the page. You revise it by running Refine: the page header shows a Planning status line for the run itself (Completed once the plan has generated, or Running, Failed, or Cancelled) next to the Refine button. Click Refine to open a panel, describe what should change in plain English, and submit. The planning agents re-run with your feedback and land a new version of the plan on the same page, leaving the previous version in history.

Refine revises what the planning agents own: audiences, benchmarks, channel mix, budget split across channels, flighting, and tactics. Refine will accept a request to change the total budget, the target geographies, or the campaign objective, but the plan is then working against a brief that says otherwise. For changes on that scale, update the campaign and generate a new Media Plan. If you want to hand-edit the numbers, take the Excel export instead.

While a refine is running, the plan sections are replaced by a "Refining your media plan" card, and the Download, Open in New Tab, Refine and version-history controls are disabled until it finishes. You can cancel a refine in flight; the previous plan comes back if you cancel or the refine fails.

Every refine creates a new version. The clock icon in the page header opens version history, where you can hover any entry for a relative timestamp and restore prior versions in place. Detailed mechanics live in Refine.

Sharing and exports

The Download button supports Excel and Markdown. Open in New Tab opens a read-only standalone view at /view/media-plan/[id]. Both are disabled while a refine is running. Format coverage and caveats live in Exports & sharing.

If you're new to Skeleton Key, the Quickstart walks through the end-to-end flow.