Flight plan template for Fintech

The flight plan with three columns a regulated financial product needs: which product this week sells, which market it may be delivered in, and the reference of the review that cleared the creative running in it.

Everything else is the general flight plan, unchanged. One row per week of one line of spend, a phase on every row, a share of the flight on each, and a decision point at the end of every phase.

Use it when the creative in market has to be traceable to a review on any given day, which is the normal condition of a regulated product. A weekly row with a review reference in it answers the question a compliance team will eventually ask, without anybody reconstructing it from an ad account.

Write it after the media plan is approved, and re-read it the moment a rate, a fee or a term changes, because every week carrying the old wording is a row in this sheet.

Regulated advertising eventually produces one question: what was running, where, on this date, and who cleared it. Most teams answer it badly, by reconstructing a timeline from change histories in an ad account and hoping nothing was edited without a note.

A weekly flight plan answers it by construction. One row per week per line, the creative set named, the review reference beside it, the jurisdiction stated. The document that was written to plan the spend becomes the document that explains it afterwards, and it costs nothing extra because the columns were going to be filled in anyway.

That is the main reason this version of the plan exists. The second reason is more ordinary: in this category the cost of being wrong for a week is higher than in most, so the weekly checkpoint is worth having even when nothing is going wrong.

The product column sets the economics, because approval rates and funded rates differ between an account, a card and a loan by enough to make a blended number meaningless.

The jurisdiction column sets the permission. A week that runs in two markets under different wording is two rows. Keeping it as one means the only record of the restriction lives in a delivery setting, and delivery settings are edited by people who have never read the plan and have no reason to know why a market was excluded.

The review reference ties the two together. It is the identifier of the review that cleared the creative in market that week, with its date, and it is the column that turns the plan into a record.

Rates, fees and terms change, and when they do every piece of creative cleared against the old ones becomes stale at the same moment.

With a reference in every row, that event is a filter. List the remaining weeks whose reference predates the change, and you have the work, in order, with owners attached. Without one, the same task is reading every ad in every account and trusting that nobody missed one.

Plan for it explicitly where a change is known in advance. A rate moving mid-flight is a phase boundary: the weeks before it run one creative set, the weeks after it run another, and the dependency column carries the new review with a due date at least a week before the switch.

The phases here are usually three, and they are shaped by approval rather than by attention.

A launch phase, where the creative is new and the first cohort of applications is being read for quality rather than volume. A sustain phase, where the weight is steady and the question is whether the mix of applicants is drifting. A wind-down, where retargeting follows up people who began an application and did not finish, under tighter constraints than the prospecting weeks.

The retargeting phase deserves its own note in the plan. An audience built from people who started an application is defined by a financial circumstance, and what may be said to it is narrower than what may be said to a cold audience. Write the constraint into the notes on those rows rather than trusting it to be remembered by whoever builds them.

Volume questions answer themselves. The decision points worth writing here are about who is arriving.

Whether the approval rate from this creative is holding. Whether applications are coming from the segment the product is for, or from people the underwriting will decline. Whether the funded rate justifies the weight. Each of those is readable within a week or two of a creative change, and each of them changes what the next phase should do.

The trap is a creative that produces cheap applications from people who will not qualify. It looks like the best week in the flight for as long as nobody joins the advertising numbers to the underwriting numbers, and the weekly decision point is what forces them together while there is still budget left to move.

In this category the dependency column is rarely a shoot. It is a page update, a disclosure refresh, a new review, a product change landing on a Thursday.

Give each one a due date at least a week before the row that needs it, and treat a missed dependency as a reason to hold the week rather than to start and catch up. Creative that ran before its review is the one mistake here that turning it off does not undo.

Every week of every line has a row. Every row names one product and one jurisdiction. Every row carries the review reference of the creative in market that week, and none of those references predates the last change to a rate, a fee or a term. Every phase names its first week, its last week and its intent. Every dependency has a due date before the week that needs it. And every phase carries a decision point about who is arriving, not only how many.

A flight that passes those six is not necessarily a good flight. It is a flight that can answer, on any date, what was running and who cleared it, which in this category is the property that turns a good quarter into a defensible one.