Playbook: Media Planning & Fast Agency Pitching

Project template walkthrough

This page walks through the built-in Media Planning & Agency Pitch Suite project template (media-planning-pitch) — choose it under New Project. File names, figures and run times are an illustrative example, not a benchmark; your results depend on your files and the model you select.

Domain: Advertising & Media Planning
Target Roles: Media Director, Media Planner, Account Director, Agency Founder
Example run time: 25 Minutes

---

1. The Agency Challenge

Media agencies win or lose multi-million dollar annual client accounts in competitive pitches:

• A client issues an RFP on Tuesday with a pitch presentation scheduled for Friday morning.
• Compiling the Master Media Plan requires:
  • Consolidating channel rate cards (Meta, TikTok, Google, Programmatic, Out-of-Home).
  • Calculating Reach, Frequency, Impressions, Clicks, and Gross Rating Points (GRP) across weeks.
  • Designing a persuasive 12-slide Pitch Deck.
• Normally, this burns out 3 junior media planners and 1 designer over 4 days of grueling overtime.

---

2. Step-by-Step Walkthrough: Winning a $200,000 FMCG Pitch

Step 1: Ingest Client RFP & Rate Cards into Sources

• Client_RFP_Brief_NutMilk.pdf: $200,000 budget, 8-week campaign, target audience: urban females 22–35, KPIs: 60M impressions, 220,000 site visits.
• Agency_Q3_Rate_Card.xlsx: Contracted CPMs and CPCs (TikTok Ads CPM $1.80, Meta CPM $2.40, YouTube Bumper CPM $3.20, Google Search CPC $0.35, Billboard LED screens).
• Past_Campaign_Benchmarks.xlsx: Historical CTRs per channel (TikTok 0.20%, Meta 0.30%, YouTube Bumpers 0.05%), organic reach and average video completion rates.

Step 2: Run the Media Director Prompt

Formulate an agency-grade Master Media Plan and client pitch deck for the Nut Milk campaign in `Client_RFP_Brief_NutMilk.pdf`:

1. Budget Allocation: Allocate the $200,000 total budget across a 3-stage funnel flighting model:
   - Teasing (Weeks 1-2, 20% budget): High-impact Awareness (TikTok TopView, YouTube Bumpers).
   - Launch (Weeks 3-5, 55% budget): Consideration & Trial (TikTok in-feed spark ads, Meta carousel, Influencer whitelisting).
   - Sustain / Retarget (Weeks 6-8, 25% budget): Conversion (Google Search, Meta retargeting, E-commerce vouchers).
2. Deterministic Media Calculations:
   - Calculate exact Impressions, Clicks, Reach (%), Average Frequency, and total GRP per channel.
3. Export Deliverables:
   - Compile `reports/Master_Media_Plan.xlsx` with weekly flighting flowcharts.
   - Build the client pitch deck `reports/Media_Pitch_Deck.pptx` (12 slides) in our agency template, with charts from the workbook.

Step 3: What AMBA Executes Autonomously

1. Mathematical Media Modeling:

   • Impressions = (Budget / CPM) × 1,000
   • Clicks = Impressions × CTR
   • GRP = Reach (%) × Frequency
   • Computes total campaign impressions: 78,819,444 (31% above the client's 60M target).
   • Computes total estimated traffic: 254,291 clicks (16% above the client's 220,000 target).

2. Channel Allocation Matrix (every figure follows from the budget, the rate card and the benchmark CTR):

   Channel	Budget	Rate	Impressions	CTR	Clicks
   TikTok	40% · $80,000	CPM $1.80	44,444,444	0.20%	88,889
   Meta	30% · $60,000	CPM $2.40	25,000,000	0.30%	75,000
   YouTube Bumpers	15% · $30,000	CPM $3.20	9,375,000	0.05%	4,688
   Google Search	15% · $30,000	CPC $0.35	—	—	85,714
   Total	$200,000		78,819,444		254,291

   Search is bought per click, so its clicks count toward traffic but it adds no impressions to the total.

3. Presentation Compilation:

   • Builds 12 slides in your agency's deck template (its own masters, layouts, theme and fonts): Market Insight, Audience Persona, Strategic Framework, Channel Architecture, Weekly Flighting Flowchart, Budget Allocation Breakdown, KPI Guarantees, and Reporting Dashboard.

Numbers that match the workbook

AMBA writes the workbook first, reads it back, and checks every significant number on the slides — text, tables and chart data — (budgets, impressions, clicks, percentages) against the workbook's calculated values. A figure that is off by ×1,000 — for example impressions quoted as clicks — is sent back for correction, and totals are computed per metric, never across metrics.

Step 4: Deliverables in reports/

• 📊 reports/Master_Media_Plan.xlsx: Multi-tab agency workbook containing Summary Dashboard, Channel Cost Breakdown, Weekly Flighting Gantt Chart, and Daily Pacing Model.
• 📽️ reports/Media_Pitch_Deck.pptx: 12-slide pitch deck in your template, with native PowerPoint charts (budget by channel, funnel split, weekly flighting) you can still edit.
• 📄 reports/Media_Pitch_Proposal.md (optional): a written proposal with a 1-click PDF, only when you ask for one.

Total Time: 25 minutes. Agency submits a winning proposal days before competing agencies.

---

3. Your Agency's Deck Template

The pitch deck is built in your own PowerPoint template, not in a generic AMBA design.

1. Open the project, click the settings button in the project header and stay on General.
2. Under Company deck template, click Choose file… and pick your .potx or .pptx. A file outside the project is copied into sources/uploads/templates/; nothing leaves your device.
3. From now on every new deck in this project uses that template's masters, layouts, theme and fonts. To use a client's template for one pitch instead, add it to Sources and name it in your prompt ("use sources/uploads/Client_Template.potx").

What AMBA does with the template:

• Reads its layouts first and fills their placeholders (title, content, two content, key figures …); it never restyles the masters.
• Removes the template's sample slides and refuses a deck that still contains prompt text such as "Click to add title", leftover sample slides or empty placeholders.
• Draws charts as native PowerPoint charts whose embedded data equals the workbook cells, so you can still edit them in PowerPoint.

No template set?

AMBA uses its neutral 16:9 template (clean layouts, theme fonts for Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean). You can set a company template later; decks already written are not changed.