Think about when you actually need a media number. A client asks what $50k gets them. Someone floats adding CTV and wants to know what it does to reach. A partner asks, half-seriously, whether a budget is even worth showing up for. None of these moments happen at your desk. They happen in a room, on a call, walking to a car — and they all have a shelf life of about thirty seconds.
What we all actually do
You say you'll get back to them. And you do, eventually, with a better answer than you could have given live — which arrives after the conversation that needed it has already ended. Or you guess, commit to the guess out loud, and spend the next week quietly making the plan fit the number you blurted.
The best plan is the one that exists when the question gets asked.
The bad assumption
Every media planning tool assumes a desk. A login, a session, a twenty-minute window, two monitors. That's a fine assumption for building the real plan — the one with line items and flighting that goes in the deck. It's a terrible assumption about where planning actually starts, which is a conversation where somebody says a number out loud and everyone looks at you.
So we built the small one
ArcPlanner Go is free, it's on iPhone, and it does the narrow thing: calculators, quick plans, and CPM benchmarks. It is deliberately not the desktop app on a small screen. It doesn't ask you to build a campaign — it answers one question fast enough to stay inside the conversation that prompted it, and then gets out of the way.
The full plan still belongs in ArcPlanner, where it should be. But the moment that decides whether there's a plan at all usually happens somewhere with no desk in it. That moment deserved a tool.
Notes from the build
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