/planning-campaigns

name: planning-campaigns
description: Decides what to make next — turns the brand, the product, your own running ads and competitor research into the concepts worth testing next. Each concept is a full description of one ad, the buyer it targets, the bet it tests and the evidence it rests on — complete enough for a producer to build from directly. Nothing is generated before the plan is approved — it asks which concepts to build, and only then hands each approved concept to the skill that builds it. Use when the user asks what to make, what to test next, what hooks or angles to try, for campaign concepts, or a creative plan — or wants the whole campaign run end to end, from research to finished ads. Not for a single ad with no plan behind it — that goes straight to the producer skill.
license: Apache-2.0
metadata:
  version: "0.1.2"
  category: creative
  summary: "Decides what your next ads should be. It reads your brand, your product, the ads you already run and what competitors are doing, then writes concepts ranked by what is worth testing — each a full description of one ad, the buyer it targets and the bet it tests, with the proof it rests on and the skill that would build it. Approve the plan and it builds the concepts you pick, one by one, through the specialist skills."

Campaign planning

Decide what ads to make next, write each one down as a concept a producer can build from directly, and build the ones the user approves.

**Nothing is generated before the plan is approved.** Everything up to the plan is planning; building is a separate decision the user makes at the end, concept by concept.

Workflow

Step 1: Scope the run

Ask once, bundled into a single message, always with a free-text way out. Skip any of these the brief already answers.

| Ask | When | How | | --- | --- | --- | | **The product** | Always. | A URL or a photo. Where they name several, ask whether it is one campaign for all of them or one each. | | **The objective** | The brief doesn't say. | Offer awareness, consideration and conversion, and a way to type another. | | **The competitors** | The brief names none. | A name and a website for each. Where the user doesn't know, say you will let the research propose them and confirm before it reads anything. | | **The market** | The brief names none and the site implies none. | Offer the likely markets, and a way to type another. | | **How deep to go** | The brief doesn't say. | Offer the quick scan first and recommend it; say the deeper option roughly doubles what is watched, and costs accordingly. |

Ask them here, and pass the answers down. Don't go on without the product.

Step 2: Gather the context

**Open the run's folder first.** Everything this run produces lives in one place: `campaigns/<date-time>` under `./supercmo-files`. Where a folder for this minute already exists, add `-2`, `-3`, … rather than writing into it.

The plan is built from four inputs. Collect each one; skip one only where the brief already carries what it would return.

**Every answer from Step 1 goes into the request that starts each skill** — the product, the objective, the competitors, the market, the depth. A skill that receives them treats its own scoping questions as already answered; one that doesn't will guess. Where something is still unsettled, have the skill report it back rather than assume, and bring it to the user here.

• **The product.** Trigger the `analyzing-products` skill workflow with the URL or photo. This gives

what the product is, how it is used, and what it can be shown doing.

• **The brand.** Trigger the `analyzing-brand` skill workflow with the brand's website. This gives

the voice, the audience, the differentiators and the proof points.

• **Our own ads.** Trigger the `analyzing-own-ads` skill workflow. This gives what the account

already covers, what is holding, and what was stopped.

• **Competitors' ads.** Trigger the `researching-competitor-ads` skill workflow. This gives the

category's patterns, what its long-runners share, and what nobody runs.

**Each skill gets its own folder inside the run's folder, named after it, and everything it produced goes in there** — every file, not a chosen few. Tell each skill to write there; where one wrote somewhere else because a tool gave it no location, copy everything it produced across before moving on. Nothing this run rests on is left in a temporary folder.

Close the step by saying in one line which of the four inputs the plan is built on, and which are absent — skipped, failed, or returned empty.

Step 3: Build the concept list

Turn the gathered context into the concepts to test.

**Decide how many — don't ask.** Up to three campaigns, and up to ten concepts in each. Those are ceilings, not targets: build as many as the evidence carries and stop there, saying what ran out. Where the brief already asks for a specific number, or for one specific output, honor that instead.

Read `references/finding-concepts.md` and work through it — it writes the campaigns and their concepts to `concepts.md` in the run's folder. Each concept is written in full, as the whole handoff a producer builds from; there is no separate brief. Whether a concept can be produced is not a criterion here — routing is Step 4.

Step 4: Route each concept

Tag each concept in `concepts.md` with the skill that would build it, using `references/production-palette.md`. **Every concept gets a route, and no concept is dropped for being unroutable.**

Step 5: Hand the plan over

**5a. Finish the file.** `concepts.md` now carries the campaigns with their concepts and routes in order; add a short grounding header saying which inputs the plan is built on. **Everything the plan cites is named by a path inside the run's folder or by a link** — never by a code that needs a document the folder doesn't hold.

**5b. Present it, in one message.** Which inputs the plan is built on, then each campaign with its concepts in orde