Media plan template for Fintech

The media plan with five columns a regulated financial product needs: which product the line sells, where it may be sold, the reference of the review that cleared its wording, the disclosure that has to travel with it, and what the line counts as a result.

Everything else is the general plan, unchanged. One row per line of spend, budgets as integers in minor units, one currency named per row, and a target column that ships blank because the number is yours.

Use it when the wording on an ad is decided before the audience is, which is the normal condition of a lending, payments or banking product. A plan that treats copy review as a step after the media is booked will keep discovering, in the launch week, that the line it planned cannot run in the market it planned it for.

Write it before anything is built, and re-read it whenever a product changes a rate, a fee or a term. Those changes invalidate wording that was cleared against the old ones, and the plan is the only document that lists every line the old wording is sitting in.

In most accounts a media plan starts with who is being reached. For a regulated financial product it starts earlier than that, with what may be said, to whom, and where. The audience is often the easy part: the constraint is the sentence on the ad and the sentence on the page it lands on, and both of them were cleared against terms that can change without anybody in marketing hearing about it.

So the first four columns filled in on this plan are the product, the jurisdiction, the review reference and the disclosure. Everything downstream depends on them. A line that cannot be delivered in a market is not a line with a note attached; it is a line that does not exist there, and it belongs in a separate row so that the restriction lives in the plan rather than in a delivery setting somebody will edit later without reading it.

The product column is the one that sets the economics. An everyday account, a rewards card and a personal loan have different approval rates, different funding rates and different margins, and a plan that blends them produces a cost per result that describes none of them.

The jurisdiction column is the one that sets the permission. Where a product is authorised in one market and not another, or where the same product carries different wording in two markets, those are separate rows with separate review references. The temptation to keep them as one row and handle the difference in targeting is strong, because it is fewer rows. It is also how a campaign ends up delivering into a market whose terms it has never been read against, which is a problem no amount of good performance makes smaller.

A review reference is the identifier of the review that cleared this line's wording, with the date it was given. It looks like administration and it is the most useful column in the sheet, for one reason: rates and fees change, and when they do, every piece of creative cleared against the old ones is stale at the same moment.

With a reference in every row, that change is a filter. List every line whose reference predates the change, and you have the work. Without one, the same task is reading every ad in every account and trusting that nobody missed one, which is slower and less reliable in exactly the conditions where reliability matters.

Give references a lapse date too, if your review process has one, and put it in the notes. A line whose review has lapsed is not necessarily wrong, but it is unverified, and unverified is a state worth being able to see at a glance.

The disclosure column names the wording that has to travel with the line: a comparison rate, a fee summary, an eligibility statement, a target market determination. The cell holds the name; the exact words live with the review.

That split is deliberate. A planning sheet is copied, forked and pasted into decks, and the day somebody edits a quoted disclosure in one of those copies is the day a stale version starts circulating with an air of authority. A name cannot go stale in the same way, and it still tells the person building the ad exactly what has to be on it.

The result definition column exists because an application started, an application submitted, an approved application and a funded account are four different numbers, and the gap between the first and the last is usually large enough to change every decision made on it.

Write which one the line counts, using the same words the reporting uses. Then judge the line on it. A plan whose lines count different events cannot be summed, and a plan whose lines all count applications while the business counts funded accounts will fund whichever line is best at attracting people who do not qualify.

This is also why the target column ships blank. A target for a cost per funded account depends on your approval rate and your funding rate, both of which are facts about your underwriting rather than about advertising, and neither of which a template can know. Read them from your own numbers, then write the target in.

The last thing worth writing into a financial services plan is what a retargeting row may and may not do, because it is the row most likely to be built without thinking and the row most likely to breach something.

An audience built from people who started an application is, in most frameworks, an audience defined by a financial circumstance, and the wording that reaches it has to be read with that in mind. The safe version is a row whose creative says nothing the reader has not already seen — a reminder of the product, not a reference to their situation — and whose landing page carries the same disclosure as the prospecting row it follows.

Put the constraint in the notes on the row rather than trusting that whoever builds it will remember. A retargeting line is usually the cheapest line in the account, which means it is the one nobody questions, which is exactly why it is worth writing down what it is allowed to say.

Six checks. Every row names one product and one jurisdiction. Every row carries a review reference with a date, and none of them predates the last change to a rate, a fee or a term. Every row names the disclosure that travels with it. Every result definition is one of the events your reporting actually distinguishes. Every budget is an integer in minor units with its currency named. And every target traces to your own approval and funding rates, or is blank with the reason in the notes.

A plan that passes those six is not necessarily a good plan. It is a plan that can be re-read in an afternoon the next time the product changes, which in this category is the property that matters most.