Plan a product launch flight

Before. Reaching people who do not yet know the thing exists, so that the day it launches there is an audience with some context. Its job is coverage and its measure is reach and cost of attention, not sales that have not happened yet. Grading this phase on immediate return is the single most common way a launch loses its first flight.

The day, and the week around it. Converting the demand you built and the demand that arrives on its own. This is the phase with the tightest window, the highest daily rate, and the least tolerance for a delivery system still working out who to show the ad to.

After. Returning to the people who came close, and finding the ones the first two phases missed. Its economics are usually the best of the three, which is why it is also the phase most often cut short when attention moves on.

Three jobs, three lines in the plan, three flights. Not because the platforms require it but because a report six weeks later has to be able to tell them apart, and one campaign edited twice cannot be.

A plan carries a start day and an end day and every item's flight sits inside them, checked in both directions — narrowing a window under an item that no longer fits is refused with the item named rather than silently stranding it.

Set the window to cover all three phases plus a margin at each end. A launch plan whose window ends on launch week has to become a second plan for the phase that earns the most, and two plans covering one launch is two totals nobody adds up.

Then place the flights. The before-phase ends when the launch phase begins or overlaps it deliberately; the after-phase starts before the launch phase ends, because the people worth returning to are generated during it rather than after. Overlap is a decision, so make it on purpose and write down why in the brief.

The flight plan template is where overlapping flights stop being a thing you hold in your head, and the launch checklist template is the operational half — the things that have to be true before the first flight starts.

Each item's budget is the whole-flight total, not a daily rate. The daily figure a platform wants is derived at materialisation by dividing the total over the inclusive length of the flight, and this is where launch plans get refused.

The launch-week line is the problem. A short flight carrying a large total produces a large daily figure, and a draft may not set a daily budget above the account's own ceiling — derived from what that account has actually done, three times the highest single-campaign daily spend in its last twenty-eight days, floored at a default in the account's own currency. An account whose history is a steady trickle cannot suddenly carry a launch week, and the refusal arrives at materialisation rather than while you are typing.

Two honest responses. Lengthen the flight, which lowers the daily figure and is usually the better answer anyway. Or split the line into several campaigns, each within the ceiling, which is also what a launch week usually wants for other reasons.

What is not an answer is raising the ceiling, because nothing in the product does. It is derived from the account, and it moves as the account does.

The plan's brief is prose and nothing parses it. It exists so the plan still makes sense to whoever did not write it, and so an agent has the intent in front of it when you ask for help with the items.

For a launch it carries four things. What is launching and to whom. What each phase is for, in one line each, because that is what stops the before-phase being graded on the launch phase's measure. What counts as working, stated as a comparison rather than a feeling. And the date the plan gets revisited, which for a launch is usually two dates: one during and one after.

Write a campaign brief that survives handover is the longer form of this, and the campaign brief template is the document version.

The item's name is carried straight onto the draft and then onto the campaign, so the name typed into the plan is the name a report groups on. That makes naming a measurement decision made at planning time.

Encode the things you will filter by and nothing else: the launch, the phase, and the variable if the line is one of a pair. Not the date you typed it, not the version of the brief, not somebody's initials. Three phases named for their phase is a report that reads itself; three phases named after the product with a number after each is a report somebody has to decode.

Materialising the plan turns every item into a create-campaign draft at the gate, grouped into one batch per connection with items in board order, and validates everything before writing anything: flights inside the window, budgets as whole numbers of minor units, an ad account resolved for each item, currencies matching, then the kill switch and the budget guardrails. A failure at any step drafts nothing at all.

Stated plainly, because a launch is exactly when somebody assumes otherwise: your connections read your accounts, a change is written as a draft on the record with the state it would change from and the checks it passed, applying it is gated on approval — by you, or by a rule you wrote — and no platform write reaches a customer account until that platform has granted write access. Applying a cleared change to a platform is in private beta.

The property that makes a phased launch work is the one people discover by accident: every create lands paused. Approving the whole batch builds all three phases and spends nothing, and starting each phase is a separate change through the same gate on the day it starts. Build everything once, start them in order — which is what a launch wanted all along.

Turn a media plan into campaign drafts is that step in detail. If the launch is a recurring calendar event rather than a one-off, Plan for a seasonal peak is the version with history to plan against.