In-House Media Workshop: Decisions, Not Tool Training

A workshop here runs two consecutive days with no more than nine people in the room, and every exercise uses your own material: last quarter's spend, last quarter's agency deck, campaigns that are live while we sit there. There is no session explaining what a conversion is. Day one, taking the reporting apart: The team brings the last four reports, internal or from the agency. We read them for claims. Which sentence is an observation, which is an inference, which number is last-click attribution being presented as incremental contribution. Most teams find at least one line that has been reported as a result for three quarters and does not survive the second question. Nobody is embarrassed by this. The point is that the room learns what the question sounds like when it is asked properly. Day two, writing the decision down: Each attendee writes a media brief for something they actually own. One page: objective, the constraint they cannot spend their way out of, the owner, and the kill criterion. The kill criterion is the number that, if unmet by a stated date, ends the spend without a meeting. They defend it to the room. Briefs leave signed and dated. Teams that have never written a kill criterion find this the longest ninety minutes of the two days. Why nine people: Past nine, attendees stop defending their own work and start agreeing with whoever spoke last. If your team is larger we run two cohorts rather than one bigger room. I will not run this for a department of thirty in an auditorium, because nothing that matters happens in that format. What sits in the material: The brief one-pager. A naming and UTM taxonomy with a single named owner. The difference between a GA4 exploration and a Looker Studio report, and which of the two an agency should never send you as evidence. Geo holdout design, and the spend level below which running one is theatre. A reading checklist for agency reports. For Turkish teams the budget model carries the 15 percent withholding under Presidential Decision 476 on advertising paid to non-resident platforms, and the 7.5 percent digital services tax. A team planning in gross platform spend is planning against a number that is wrong by roughly a fifth. Sector shape: For education and edtech the exercises run against the enrolment calendar: exam results, the tercih window, the weeks in which intent exists at all. A media plan for a business with fixed demand dates is a different object from a plan for continuous demand, and it is planned backwards from the dates. Manufacturers run the same exercises against the fair schedule and quotation capacity. Who must be in the room: The person who can stop spend. If the CMO, the general manager or the founder cannot attend both days, I would rather move the dates than teach a team to write kill criteria that nobody senior has agreed to honour. This is the one condition I do not waive. What this is not: Not certification. Not interface training — Google Skillshop is free and better at that than I am. Not recorded video, not a keynote, not team-building. No deck of screenshots read aloud. Who this is not for: Agencies buying training to resell. Teams of two or three with no budget authority, who need a different conversation entirely. Companies that want an invoice for training to show a board. And anyone hoping to leave with a plan: the two days produce the way a plan gets argued, not the plan itself. Languages: sessions run in English or Turkish, chosen by the room rather than by me. Materials are delivered in both.