Smart Flighting
Convincing media teams that spending in fewer weeks would beat spreading the budget evenly. An interactive timing optimizer that replaced Excel, targeting a +1–1.5% net-revenue uplift from timing alone, without spending a euro more.
- Role
- Product lead
- Context
- Heineken · 2021 – 2026
- Domain
- Media planning
- Approach
- Response curves · saturation
What Smart Flighting does.
Allocation AI decides where each brand and channel gets it. 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.
Going dark feels like underspending.
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.
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, not an optimizer that hands them a plan.
The impressive path was a one-click "here is your optimal schedule." I rejected it. A media team won't accept a plan that goes dark in weeks they always run, unless they can test their own laydown and watch the model show them the waste. So the tool lets them drive, and surfaces saturation as they go.
Made wasted pressure visible per week, not just a recommendation.
Rather than a black-box "better plan," the tool shows where each extra week of pressure stops paying back. Exposing the model's logic to scrutiny is the point: a planner who can see the saturation is a planner who will move the money.
Shipped a lightweight tool to replace Excel, not a platform.
It started as an Excel proof of concept, itself the cheap validation that timing alone moved the number. I said no to over-building: get planners off spreadsheets and into a fact-based toolkit fast, prove the timing value, and leave deeper integration for later.
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.
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.
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.
Sets the annual budget across markets, brands and channels.
Read the case study ›
Fills the calendar with the promo mechanics that actually pay back.
Read the case study ›Times each budget week by week, so pressure lands where it still converts.