What is Campaign Flighting and How Do You Plan Media Schedules?
Campaign flighting is a media scheduling pattern in which advertising runs in concentrated bursts, called flights, separated by periods with no advertising at all. Planners use it to put budget behind the weeks when buyers are actually in market, such as a holiday season, a product launch, or a sales event, instead of spreading spend evenly across the year.
Flighting vs continuous vs pulsing
Every media schedule follows one of three timing patterns. The American Marketing Association definitions published by the Radio Advertising Bureau describe them this way:
- Continuous: messages run throughout the whole period of the plan at a steady level. It suits products bought year-round, where a competitor can step into any gap.
- Flighting: messages run during set intervals separated by periods with no advertising. It suits seasonal demand, launches and limited budgets.
- Pulsing: spending continues in every period, with noticeably heavier weeks layered on top. It is a hybrid of the two: an always-on base plus bursts around peaks.
The real question is not which pattern is best in the abstract. It is how closely the schedule tracks the category's demand curve, and how long a brand can afford to be absent.
Why flighting works
Flighting concentrates weight. A fixed budget compressed into fewer weeks buys more reach and frequency inside each flight, which matters when a message has to break through a crowded period. The same logic drives TV buying around tentpole windows and upfronts, where inventory for those windows is committed months ahead.
Advertising also does not stop working the day a flight ends. Marketing mix models treat media as having a lagged effect: Google's open-source Meridian model describes a channel's impact as one that "tapers off slowly over time" and captures it with an adstock function. That carryover is what lets a flighted schedule keep some of its effect through the dark weeks between bursts.
The risk: going dark for too long
Carryover decays. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research on 70 consumer goods brands, summarized by Thinkbox, found that when brands stopped advertising, sales fell on average 16% after one year and 25% after two. Small brands typically suffered greater declines than big ones, and the trend reversed quickly for small growing brands. Gaps between flights are measured in weeks, not years, but the direction is the same: the longer the hiatus, the more it costs to rebuild. That is why many planners move from pure flighting to pulsing once a brand depends on steady demand.
How to plan a flighted schedule
- Map demand first. Use search trends, sales history, and category seasonality to find the windows when buyers are in market. Flights go there.
- Set the weight of each flight. Decide what each burst must deliver in gross rating points or a reach target, then size the flight to hit it.
- Control frequency inside the burst. Concentrated weight can over-serve the same people. A frequency cap keeps digital flights from wasting impressions.
- Time it within the day. Flight dates and dayparts work together: the flight decides which weeks the campaign is live, the daypart decides when each spot runs.
- Decide what runs in the gaps. Some brands keep a low base of evergreen advertising between flights, which turns a flighted plan into a pulsing one.
- Phase the budget by flight. Allocating spend across flights is a core part of how to budget for advertising, and it should be agreed before any inventory is bought.
Flighting in practice
Holiday retail is the textbook flighting category. Since 2019, Criterion Global has worked on Hallmark's holiday marketing campaigns, where Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Christmas represent a substantial portion of sales. Each occasion is a concentrated window, and the work balanced awareness media that drove store traffic with conversion-focused digital. Our guide to holiday advertising covers how to plan those windows.
For brands flighting across several countries, the calendar multiplies: holidays, fiscal quarters, and buying seasons differ by market. Our international media planning and buying team builds schedules that flight market by market rather than forcing one global calendar.