At a glance: what each file is for
| File | Main purpose | Typical data | Primary question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Media Plan | Plan investment and delivery | Market, publisher, placement, channel, dates, rates, budget, impressions | What media are we buying? |
| CMM / Creative Matrix | Define creative requirements | Creative name, market, language, format, size, duration, landing page | Which ad should run where? |
| Platform Export | Expose system setup and IDs | Placement name, placement ID, campaign ID, status or platform fields | What has been created in the platform? |
| Trafficking Sheet | Operationally join and QA the campaign | Combined placement, creative, destination, ID and plan values | Is the campaign setup ready and consistent? |
What is a media plan?
A media plan is the commercial and strategic source for the planned buy. It usually tells the campaign team which markets, partners, channels and placements have been approved, when they should run and what delivery or investment values have been planned.
For trafficking, the media plan establishes the expected universe of activity. If a placement appears in the approved plan but has no corresponding creative instruction or platform setup, that difference needs to be resolved before launch.
What is a CMM or creative matrix?
A creative matrix describes the asset-level instructions for the campaign. Depending on the organisation, CMM may be shorthand for a creative matrix or creative messaging matrix. The terminology is less important than the function: it maps creative variants to the conditions under which they should run.
Common fields include creative or asset name, language, market, format, dimensions, video duration, audience or message variant, landing page and sometimes platform-ready naming.
What is a platform or placement export?
A platform export is a file taken from a system where campaign objects have already been created. Depending on the workflow, that might be an ad server, campaign-management platform, buying platform or another operational system.
The export becomes especially useful when the trafficking workflow needs system-generated identifiers. A placement name may be recognisable to a human, but downstream operations often require the exact placement ID or campaign ID associated with it.
A platform export is not always available at the start. Some teams build the trafficking sheet before placements are created and add IDs later; other teams use an existing export as an input for reconciliation.
How the files connect
Think of the workflow as a series of joins rather than a single spreadsheet transformation:
- The media plan defines the planned activity.
- The creative matrix supplies the assets and destinations that belong to that activity.
- The platform export, when available, supplies the system identifiers associated with the placements.
- The trafficking sheet brings these together in an operational format and exposes unresolved differences.
That is why simple copy-and-paste workflows can become fragile. The files rarely share one perfect unique key. Teams may need to use combinations of market, partner, placement name, format, size, creative naming or other fields to identify the correct relationships.
Common reconciliation problems
- Different naming conventions: a partner or placement is abbreviated differently across files.
- Different granularity: one media-plan row may map to several creative variants.
- Missing identifiers: a placement exists in the plan but has not yet been created in the platform.
- Format inconsistencies: video duration, display size or channel labels differ across sources.
- Landing-page gaps: the creative exists but its destination is blank or unclear.
- Version drift: one file has been updated while another still reflects an earlier campaign plan.
The safest workflow flags those mismatches for review instead of forcing a match simply to complete the sheet.
How automation can help reconcile campaign files
Automation can reduce the repetitive work of identifying headers, standardising text, comparing values and matching related rows across source files. The harder cases are the ambiguous ones: when multiple rows look plausible, source data is missing, or campaign-specific context is required.
TraffiqGen's current beta is designed around that distinction. It accepts a Media Plan and one or more CMM / creative matrix files, with optional platform exports and supporting files. It uses rules and schema inference to detect likely structures and cross-file relationships, then keeps exceptions visible for human review rather than presenting uncertain matches as facts.
See the media trafficking automation guide or read what a trafficking sheet is and what it contains.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a media plan and a creative matrix?
The media plan describes the planned media buy; the creative matrix describes the creative assets and instructions that need to be connected to that buy.
What does a platform export add?
It can add system-generated setup data, especially placement names and IDs that are needed to reconcile planned activity with what exists in the activation environment.
Is a platform export mandatory?
No. Some workflows use it as an optional enrichment or validation source, particularly when IDs are created after the first trafficking-sheet version.
Why not just join the files on placement name?
Exact placement names may differ across files, and one planned row can correspond to multiple creative or platform rows. Reliable matching often requires several signals rather than a single text field.
Turn campaign files into one reviewable output
TraffiqGen is built to reduce cross-file campaign reconciliation without hiding genuine exceptions.
Try the beta →