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 once it's marked Ready. 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.

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.

Editing and version history

The Media Plan is editable in place. 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 Edit button. Click Edit to clone the current Ready version into a working draft: an Editing banner appears, Edit is replaced by Save and Cancel, fields across all three sections become editable, and changes auto-save about 1.5 seconds after you stop typing. Save commits the draft to a new Ready version; Cancel discards it and returns to the previous Ready version. A draft only lives until you Save or Cancel, so leaving the page without saving does not preserve it.

The plan's own draft-versus-ready state is not shown as a status of its own. You can tell a draft by the Editing banner, and by Download and Open in New Tab staying disabled until the plan is Ready.

Saving the plan as Ready triggers a validation pass, and a validation banner appears at the top of the page if it finds anything. Blocking errors (missing required fields, budget rollups that don't match channel rows, dates outside the campaign window) must be fixed before the plan can move to Ready. Lower-severity warnings allow you to continue past them via a "Continue Anyway" button. Validation only runs on Save, never while you type, so a plan can look complete in edit mode and still surface a stack of blocking errors when you save it.

Every Save 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, and is only enabled once status is Ready. Open in New Tab opens a read-only standalone view at /view/media-plan/[id], also Ready-only; until then its tooltip prompts you to mark the plan Ready first. Drafts can be neither exported nor opened in a standalone view. Format coverage and caveats live in Exports & sharing.

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