Creative budget planning: start from what you can read

Start with the total. Then decide the impressions one creative needs before you would act on its result.

Divide the media half by the cost of reaching those impressions. That gives the number of creatives you can read this month.

Multiply that count by 113 credits, which is one forty second finished ad. That is your production budget.

If the production number is small next to the media half, you have the correct split and can stop.

If it is not, you are either making ads that are too expensive or reading too few of them.

Almost nobody does this in this order. That is why creative budgets get argued about at the wrong end.

The order matters more than the arithmetic. Start from production cost and you will size the media half to fit a number that should have been an output.

A small account reading six creatives a month needs about 678 credits of production. That sits inside Basic at $39.99 for 2,500 credits with most of the plan unused.

A mid account reading twenty creatives needs about 2,260 credits. That is Basic plus one $15 top-up of 1,000 credits.

A larger account reading forty creatives needs about 4,520 credits. That is Premium at $79.99 for 5,000.

In all three the production line is small enough that nobody should be arguing about it in a planning meeting.

Run your own numbers through the same three steps and the line will land in the same place.

What changes between them is the media half and the willingness to act on what it reports.

If your production line is larger than your media line, the plan is upside down and no tool fixes that.

The word creative in a budget usually means a finished asset somebody is proud of. That framing is expensive.

Published benchmarks put the winner share at roughly 5 to 8 percent, from Motion's analysis of 550,000+ Meta ads.

So thirteen to twenty of every set will lose. A plan that treats each one as a deliverable produces six a month and stalls.

Budget instead for attempts. Cheap, fast, disposable, judged only by the numbers.

One three minute take can hold four scripts recorded in one session. Each one batches separately at 100 credits.

Four attempts from one filming slot is roughly 452 credits. That is what an attempt budget looks like in practice.

That single habit changes the shape of a creative budget more than any pricing decision available to you.

Generated voice-over at 70 credits a minute, if any of your ads use one.

Rendered presenters at 320 credits a minute. That is over three times the filmed cost per attempt, so give it its own line and keep it visible.

Music at 20 credits a track. Small but real if you generate one per ad rather than reusing a description.

Somebody's time to film. That is the line that actually stops teams and never appears in a spreadsheet.

And the cost of a placement you cannot serve, since every export is 9:16.

Put the filming time in the plan with a name against it. That line decides whether the rest of the plan happens.

None of the other four move much once they are set. Write them in, agree them once, and stop revisiting them monthly.

Brand campaigns judged on recall work differently. The volume logic does not apply and neither does this split.

An account with one working creative is defending a winner rather than finding one. That is a different exercise.

A long consideration cycle makes a month too short to read anything, and the arithmetic misleads.

And the 113 credit figure depends on one talking-head take. Somebody has to be willing to film.

Say that out loud in the planning meeting rather than discovering it in week three. Name the person and the weekly slot.

Everything else here is boring on purpose. A named person, a filming slot, and a production line small enough that nobody debates it.

Set the production line once and review it quarterly. Give the argument time back to the half of the budget that decides the result.

That is only possible because an attempt costs about 113 credits. The fortieth costs exactly what the first one did.

A creative plan that survives a quarter is short, boring and owned by one person. This is the part of it you can settle today.