Three clocks run at once in a feed that works, and most brands try to run all of them at the same speed. The plan moves in quarters, the camera moves in months, and the feed moves in weeks. When those get collapsed into one calendar, the work starts arriving late and looking rushed, and nobody can say why.
The quarter is where the argument happens. What is this brand for, who is it talking to, and what are we going to say that nobody else in the category can. That takes research and it takes disagreement, and it cannot be done in the same week as a shoot because a shoot has its own gravity: everything becomes about the shot list.
The quarter: decide once, properly
We write the quarter down in plain language. Positioning, the two or three ideas we are testing, the formats we think will carry them, and the number we will judge it by in ninety days. It is usually two pages. If it needs more than that, the argument is not finished.
The plan also names what we are not doing. That sounds like a luxury and it is actually the most useful part: it is what stops a good week on one platform from quietly eating the budget for everything else.
The month: one production day
Filming happens once a month, on a day that is booked before the quarter starts. One day, planned to the hook, shot in the order that protects the hardest set-up. Everything else on the calendar is built from what that day produces, which is why the shot list comes from the plan and never from a mood board.
“A film cropped after the fact always looks cropped after the fact.”
Four ratios come off the same afternoon: 9:16 for reels and TikTok, 4:5 for the feed, 1:1 for the grid and LinkedIn, 16:9 for longform. They are framed at the time, not cropped in the edit, because the difference is visible and audiences read it as effort or the lack of it.
The week: publish, read, adjust
Publishing slots are fixed and everything else moves around them. On Friday we read the week: what held, what lost people and where, and what the comments actually said. The slots for next week are set against that, not against the plan we wrote in the first week of the quarter.
This is the part most calendars get wrong. A quarterly plan is not a schedule; it is a set of decisions. The schedule is a weekly thing and it should be allowed to change, or the plan becomes a document nobody reads by week three.
What it looks like when it works
Kessel Running launched with no feed and a race ninety days out. Quarter written in week one, first production day in week two, five posts a week from week three. The format that carried it was the least polished one on the list: a phone on a tripod at 6am, three times a week. We would not have found it without the weekly read, and we would not have had the time to shoot it without the monthly day.
Ninety days later: 4.1M views, reach up 312 per cent, 58,000 new followers. The plan changed twice on the way. The clocks did not.
In this piece
Written by
Tom Feather
Head of strategy, Feedra
Nine years planning quarters for consumer brands. Believes most content problems are calendar problems wearing a costume.