The product in one screen. Every brand's campaigns and the touchpoints under them, laid out across the year, so overlaps, gaps and commitments read at a glance instead of across a dozen spreadsheets. Illustrative concept · fictional brands and data.
What Smart Flighting does
Allocation AI decides how much each brand and channel gets. Smart Flighting decides when to spend it, turning a static, usually front-loaded budget into a dynamic, week-by-week execution plan.
Media teams draft a flighting plan (a weekly laydown of campaigns per brand and touchpoint) and test it against AI response curves. The tool projects the uplift of each schedule, flags campaign overlap, and shows the week an audience becomes saturated by consecutive pressure.
Built under the "Win with Execution" initiative, it grew from an Excel proof of concept into an interactive toolkit that runs alongside the same allocation system the budget was set with.
The model was never the hard part.
Media budgets were laid down statically, usually front-loaded, and planned in a spreadsheet, week by week, on experience. But audiences saturate: past a point, another week of pressure adds cost, not sales, because the message is already absorbed (ad-stock). The data science could model response and saturation per brand and touchpoint. That was not the hard part.
The hard part was a belief. Telling a media team that going dark in some weeks, and concentrating pressure in others, earns more from the same money runs against the instinct to be "always on." A plan with gaps looks like under-spending to the people who run it. The blocker was never the model; it was persuading planners to accept a schedule that felt wrong.
Why the plan goes dark some weeks. Every touchpoint saturates: the first ~560 GRPs buy most of the response, the next 450 buy almost none. Made legible so a planner can choose to move money off the flat part of the curve. Illustrative concept · fictional brands and data.
Accountable for whether planners actually changed the plan.
I led discovery and owned the move from a manual Excel toolkit to an interactive product. I was the standing bridge between the data scientists building the response and saturation curves and the media planners who had to change their laydowns.
I was accountable for whether planners actually built plans differently, not just whether a tool existed.
Three product bets that earned belief
Each one traded the fastest route to an optimum for a plan media teams would actually run.
A simulator planners drive, alongside the planning cycle.
An interactive simulator and optimizer under "Win with Execution." Planners build a full-year plan across brands, campaigns and touchpoints, then test any laydown against AI response curves, seeing projected uplift, campaign overlap, and where the audience saturates, week by week. It replaced a manual Excel process and runs alongside the yearly allocation system.
How a planner tests a call before committing. Each scenario is a saved what-if (here, more weight on social) scored on the same KPIs, with delivered impressions plotted against the responsive ceiling. Illustrative concept · fictional brands and data.
Timing alone, worth 1–1.5% of net revenue.
The real proof wasn't the model's accuracy: it was the behaviour change. Planners moved from defaulting to front-loaded, always-on plans to testing laydowns against saturation and redistributing pressure to the weeks that still respond. Targets are labelled as targets.
The payoff, on the same money. The always-on plan next to the retimed one: identical spend, pulled off the wasted weeks into fewer, fuller bursts under saturation. Weeks past saturation fall to zero and modelled net revenue rises about 1.3%. Illustrative concept · fictional brands and data.
More is not better. Timing is. The same budget, spent when the audience can still absorb it, beats the same budget spread thin, and a media team believes that only when the tool shows them the wasted weeks.
The timing layer of a three-part system
Smart Flighting takes the budget Allocation AI sets and stretches it across the calendar; Promo Advisor fills that calendar with offers.