Plan campaign

IMC Plan — Orchestrator

Communication — Step 2 of 4. Coordinates specialized agents to build an integrated marketing plan — pillars, per-channel angles, content calendar, budget allocation, phased GTM timeline — from ICP research.

Core Question: "Does every angle trace to a pillar, every channel to a habitat, and every timeline slot to a real team capacity?"

Why this skill exists, philosophy, methodology, principles, scope boundary, when NOT to use, what it pulls from elsewhere, history: references/playbook.md [PLAYBOOK].

Critical Gates — Read First

• Declare growth motion (PLG / SLG / Hybrid) BEFORE selecting channels. PLG favors community/SEO/forums; SLG favors paid/email/IRL/SMS.
• Evaluate ALL 9 channels (Search/AEO, Store, Bounty/Info, News, Forums, Social, IRL, Mailbox, SMS). Offline produces strategy + creative briefs.
• Pillars before angles. Orphan angles fail the anti-generic test.
• No channel assignment without habitat data from ICP research. No habitat → interview for it.
• Match cadence to declared team capacity. Over-scheduling guarantees missed deadlines.
• Stale ICP (>30 days) → recommend research-icp re-run (soft gate).
• Inherit house creative direction; never re-derive or contradict it. When CREATIVE-DIRECTION.md exists, the ## Creative Direction section tunes it to the campaign — it does not restate the brand world or override house movements/light/palette. Conflict or absence → soft-check done_with_concerns (see references/procedures/orchestration.md).

Quality Gate

Critic verifies (top items shown; full 11-row checklist + 4 Internal Consistency Checks + soft check live in references/procedures/orchestration.md):

• Growth motion explicitly stated (PLG / SLG / Hybrid)
• 3-5 pillars, each with ICP evidence
• 3+ angles per pillar, each passing 3Q test and scored ≥15/25
• All 9 channels evaluated (selected or explicitly skipped with rationale)
• Each selected channel has ONE specific angle + execution brief
• Budget allocation present per selected channel (when budget tier declared)
• Phased timeline (3 phases) with cadence matched to team capacity
• Launch sequence follows ORB (Owned → Rented → Borrowed)

Max 2 rewrite cycles per critic verdict. Soft check: Social-media briefs ungrounded in references/platform-channels.md (or in a >90-day-stale catalog) ship done_with_concerns — never blocks.

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Before Starting

Per references/_shared/before-starting-check.md [PLAYBOOK] — load context + check freshness (>30d → recommend research-icp re-run, soft gate).

Artifact	Source	Required?
research/product-context.md	research-icp	Recommended — positioning + accuracy + unique mechanism
research/icp-research.md	research-icp	Recommended — persona + pains + habitats + VoC + awareness
docs/forsvn/canonical/marketing/CREATIVE-DIRECTION.md	create-brand	Recommended — house art direction; inherited into the ## Creative Direction section (soft gate — absent → that section degrades to a one-line note + done_with_concerns)
docs/forsvn/artifacts/meta/sketches/prioritize-*.md	prioritize	Optional — strategic alignment
docs/forsvn/experience/{product,audience,business,goals}.md	any	Optional — keys fill gaps from prior runs

Pre-Dispatch

Canonical Pre-Dispatch (references/_shared/pre-dispatch-protocol.md [PROCEDURE]).

Needed dimensions: product, audience persona (role + size + 1-2 pains), campaign goal (90-day outcome), growth motion (drives channel weighting + budget allocation), duration + cadence, constraints (team size, budget tier, channels off-limits).

Full read order + Warm/Cold Start (5-Q) + Write-back map + Growth Motion → Channel Priority + intent-mismatch detection (defer plan-funnel for numeric targets) + --fast behavior: references/procedures/pre-dispatch.md [PROCEDURE].

Mode Resolution

Per references/_shared/mode-resolver.md [PROCEDURE] — budget: deep; --fast collapses Layer 2 sequential into single inline pass (3 pillars not 5, 2 angles/pillar, top 2-3 channels, 3-phase timeline + ORB inline, no rewrite loop). --fast does NOT skip Cold Start, Critical Gates, or artifact frontmatter contract (per marketing-skills CLAUDE.md "Safety gates supersede --fast"). Session execution profile (single-vs-multi): inherit per references/_shared/execution-policy.md.

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Agents + Routing

6 sub-agents (pillar / angle / channel / timeline / launch-sequencing / critic) across Layer 1 solo → Layer 2 sequential → critic gate. Three routes — A (quick, limited ICP), B (full, ICP complete), C (called by another skill, reuses cached campaign-plan.md or runs Route B if stale).

Full agent manifest table, route pseudocode, single-agent fallback, critic gate + named-agent rewrite loop, full Quality Gate checklist + soft check: references/procedures/orchestration.md [PROCEDURE].

Spawn mechanics, orchestrator-written sections (Growth Motion / Foundation / Channel Execution Briefs / offline notes), chain position, re-run triggers, skill deference: references/procedures/dispatch-mechanics.md [PROCEDURE]. Load both at Layer 1 dispatch entry.

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Artifact Contract

• Path: docs/forsvn/artifacts/marketing/campaign-plan.md (single per run; overwrite unless version preservation via campaign-plan.v[N].md)
• Lifecycle: pipeline — re-run on ICP update / new launch / channel reallocation / growth-motion change / capacity change
• Frontmatter: skill, version, date, status, decision_state, review_tool, reviewed_at, reviewer (+ optional: campaign_name, goal, audience, growth_motion, team_size, budget_tier, duration_days)
• Consumed by: brief-landing-page, write-outreach, write-ad, optimize-seo, brief-shortform, plan-funnel — hypothesis grounding + channel-aware composition. The ## Creative Direction section (per-campaign art direction, tier 2, inheriting house CREATIVE-DIRECTION.md) is additionally consumed by every visual brief skill (brief-graphic, brief-shortform, brief-landing-page, brief-app-preview, write-ad) by heading match — see references/format-conventions.md "Creative Direction section"
• Cross-stack contract: schema changes require atomic update of format-conventions.md § "Frontmatter — required fields" + § "Body section order" — downstream jumps by heading match

Full template + per-field rules: references/format-conventions.md [PROCEDURE].

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Anti-Patterns

references/anti-patterns.md [ANTI-PATTERN]. Re-read before any plan ships. Section 1 (Strategy & Pillar) + Section 2 (Process & Dispatch) + Section 3 (Cross-Cutting marketing-stack): 5 body (channel-first / orphan angles / identical-across-channels / too-many-pillars / capacity-vs-cadence) + 4 process (angles-before-pillars / skipping-9-channel-eval / offline-without-execution-notes / ORB-violation) + 4 cross-cutting (growth-motion-undeclared / stale-ICP-silently-shipped / frontmatter-schema-drift / wrong-skill-for-intent).

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Durable Rules (protected)

<!-- SLOW_UPDATE_START --> <!-- No pinned rules yet. Populate via the slow-update workflow (see references/slow-update-fence.md). Each pinned rule must (a) be procedural not instance-specific, (b) be earned from a regression or critic-flagged failure, (c) cite the artifact / decision record that justified pinning. --> <!-- SLOW_UPDATE_END -->

Completion Status

Every run ends with explicit status:

• DONE — pillars + angles + channels + timeline + launch sequence written, critic PASS
• DONE_WITH_CONCERNS — plan complete but with capacity-vs-cadence mismatch or thin habitat data; flagged in artifact
• BLOCKED — ICP and product context incompatible (different audiences imply different campaigns); needs user scope decision
• NEEDS_CONTEXT — research/icp-research.md and research/product-context.md missing; recommend research-icp first

Next Step

Run brief-landing-page for any campaign landing pages, optimize-seo for search-channel execution, write-outreach for outbound.

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Worked Example

Route B end-to-end (B2B SaaS PM tool — PLG, 60 days, 500 trial signups, 4 pillars + 12 angles + 5 selected + 4 skipped + 3-phase timeline + 5-phase ORB launch + critic PASS cycle 1) + cycle-2 FAIL hypothetical + Route C snippet: references/examples/campaign-walkthrough.md [EXAMPLE].

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References

• references/{playbook, format-conventions, anti-patterns}.md
• Procedures: references/procedures/{pre-dispatch, dispatch-mechanics, orchestration}.md [PROCEDURE]
• Example: references/examples/campaign-walkthrough.md [EXAMPLE]
• Domain catalogs (loaded by agents): references/{3d-angle-framework, channel-strategy, growth-play-patterns, platform-channels, examples}.md, references/distribution-models/clipping-and-live.md. growth-play-patterns.md [PLAYBOOK] is the durable per-channel play library (channel-agent + timeline-agent draw on it for execution-brief tactics). platform-channels.md maps channel-agent to references/_shared/platform-intelligence/ (§2/§3/§6) for Social-media briefs — D13.B.
• Shared: references/_shared/{pre-dispatch-protocol, before-starting-check, mode-resolver, marketing-foundations}.md — 9-channel framework, funnel-stage vocab, 3Q test, CTA formula, VoC principles
• Agents: 6 sub-agents in agents/ (see orchestration.md § Agent Manifest); critic-agent.md holds the canonical 11-row Quality Gate Checklist
• marketing-skills/CLAUDE.md §"Pre-Dispatch Protocol" + §"Complexity Routing" + §"Multi-Agent Skills"