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 order. Close with the path to concepts.md.

5c. Ask about building. Ask whether to create the assets, and if so which concepts — all of them, some of them, or none. Say that building is billed. Wait for the answer — an unanswered question is not a yes.

Step 6: Build the approved concepts

Only after the user has named which concepts to build. Take them one at a time, in the plan's order: trigger the skill the concept's route names and give it the concept from concepts.md — its description and its four fields are the whole brief, so pass them and tell the producer to build from them. Keep each producer's own approval gates — don't answer them on the user's behalf.

A concept the user didn't approve stays queued, and a concept routed outside the pipeline is never built here.

Close with one short recap: what was built and where the files are, and which concepts remain queued.

Edge cases

• No product URL or photo → ask for one and wait.
• The user won't run the ad research → plan without it and label the concepts reasoned rather than evidenced.
• The brand isn't advertising yet, or has no competitors in the library → that comes back as an empty audit, which is a real answer. Plan from the product, the brand and whichever half did return ads, and say the set has no coverage map behind it.
• A product but no brand profile → offer analyzing-brand first. If the user declines, ask which claims they will stand behind and plan from those, and say the voice is unconfirmed.
• The user asks for one thing — "give me hooks", "what angle should I try" → answer in that shape. Ranked answers with the reasoning behind each, not a set of full concepts they didn't ask for.
• The research carries no proof the brand can stand behind → plan the concepts that don't need proof and name the gap. Never invent a statistic, rating, testimonial or result to make a concept work.
• The user says "make it" / "build these" → that is Step 6's approval for those concepts. Nothing is built before it arrives.

Reference

• references/finding-concepts.md — what the data says, drafting the concepts and selecting the set, and writing each one as the full handoff a producer builds from (Step 3).
• references/production-palette.md — what each producer skill makes and needs, and how to match a concept to the most specific one, with the general generators as the fallback (Step 4).