procedure

Write a brief an agent can compile

The difference between a 45 and an 82 is four sentences.

The quality of a compiled plan is almost entirely a function of the brief, and the scoring makes that visible rather than leaving it to be discovered. A persona label with no product or offer context compiles at 45 out of 100 on paid search; the same audience with buyer-authored intent topics compiles at 82. Neither number is a judgement of your brief — they are the honest distance between what you described and what the channel can be sold. What follows is what to include so that distance is as small as it can be.
steps
6
roughly
About ten minutes
things needed first
4
before you start

What you need first

  • A clear idea of who you want to reach, in your own words rather than in segment names
  • What you sell and what the specific offer is
  • A budget and a flight, even approximate
  • The geography, named as UK cities or postcode districts
the procedure

6 steps

Every step carries the thing that goes wrong at it, in its own block. That is the part worth reading.

  1. step 01

    Describe the person, not the segment

    Write who you want to reach in plain English: sector, seniority, what they do, where they are. The language model extracts semantics from this; it never picks a vendor segment identifier, because deterministic registry tables do that by matching your terms against catalogue keywords.

    what goes wrong here

    Do not write segment names you have seen in a DSP. They will be matched as text and will usually score worse than the plain description would have.

  2. step 02

    Name the geography in mappable terms

    Use UK cities or postcode districts. The compiler resolves cities to postcode districts and to BARB television regions through an explicit table.

    what goes wrong here

    A city the geography table cannot map costs fifteen points on every channel, and the rationale names the city. If you need somewhere unusual, say so in the session rather than hoping.

  3. step 03

    Add what you sell and what the offer is

    This is the single highest-value addition. It is what moves paid search from a persona-label fallback at 45 to an interest-to-query projection at 68.

    what goes wrong here

    Without it the search plan is explicitly marked as not activation-ready, which is the compiler telling you it has not got enough to work with.

  4. step 04

    Add intent topics if you have them

    The actual phrases your buyers type when they are looking for what you sell. These become plain-language seeds that the provider's own keyword planner resolves into ideas with volume and bid data.

    what goes wrong here

    This takes search from 68 to 82. Interests are not intent: 'interested in cybersecurity' and 'searching for endpoint protection pricing' score differently and should.

  5. step 05

    State exclusions

    Anything you do not want to reach or appear beside. Exclusions veto overlapping catalogue entries and are reported separately per channel.

    what goes wrong here

    Where a channel cannot express your exclusion natively, the plan says so rather than silently dropping it. Social exclusions in particular are not compiled into audience identifiers.

  6. step 06

    Read the seven fidelity scores before the budget

    The compiled plan returns a score and a written rationale per channel. Read the rationales: they say what matched, what did not, and what would improve it.

    what goes wrong here

    If a channel scores lower than you expected, the rationale usually names the missing input rather than a limitation of the channel.

what you end up with

A persona that compiles at the top of each channel's available band, with rationales that tell you what any remaining gap is caused by.

other procedures

What else you might need to do

45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live.

Talk it through

Questions

Does a longer brief always score better?

No. Four of the seven channels carry the same score whatever audience detail you add — audio 65, addressable TV 55, DOOH 50 and cinema 40 — because their targeting vocabulary cannot express more than that however good the input. The one line of a brief that does move them is geography: naming a city the UK table cannot map costs fifteen points on every channel, floored at ten. Only CTV, search and social move, and they move on specific inputs rather than on length: marketplace segment matches for CTV, intent topics for search, interest terms for social.