Seasonal & Holiday Campaign Planner: Never Rediscover a Holiday Too Late Again

The problem this kills

Every marketing team does it. You're heads-down on this quarter's campaigns when someone says "wait — Black Friday is in six weeks and we haven't briefed a single asset." Or you realize in late September that you completely missed your biggest industry trade show because nobody put it on the plan. Or you look at the calendar and three campaigns are stacked into one frantic week in November while February sits totally empty.

The annual plan that's supposed to prevent all this usually lives in a spreadsheet that one person built once, then nobody touched. Holidays get rediscovered too late to do them well. Last year's "what worked" lives in someone's memory instead of on the page. Lead times — the six weeks of asset production a Black Friday push actually needs — aren't baked in anywhere, so the warning always comes too late to act on.

The fix isn't another static spreadsheet. It's a real planning tool that maps your holidays, observances, and industry events to themed campaign slots, shows you the whole year at a glance, and shouts when a month is empty or overloaded — before the year locks in.

What you'll build

A simple internal web app for your marketing team. You import a list of the holidays, observances, and industry events that matter to your audience and region — and you mark which ones are actually relevant (nobody needs every national-day-of-whatever). You optionally import last year's campaigns so you can see "what we did then," and your product/launch roadmap so launches land on the calendar too.

The tool then proposes a themed campaign slot for each month — a seasonal angle tied to the relevant holidays and events — and lays the whole year out at a glance. It flags every empty month (a gap you should fill) and every overloaded month (too many campaigns crammed together), and it shows lead-time warnings on the big moments ("Black Friday needs assets started 6 weeks out — that's the week of Oct 13"). The marketing lead reviews the proposed map, edits the themes and slots, and approves it. Only then does it become the working annual plan that everyone else builds briefs against. Finally you export the approved plan as a clean CSV, organized by month and quarter.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your planning cadence, which holidays and events actually matter to your audience and region, how your last-year campaign export is shaped, your typical lead times for big pushes, how many campaigns a month can realistically hold, and the messy exceptions (regional holidays, moveable dates, themes that span two months). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and gets your thumbs-up before it builds anything — so the planner fits how your team actually plans the year, not a generic marketing template.

From there it walks the agent through the data model, importing holidays and last year's campaigns, marking relevance, the theme-proposal engine, the gap-and-overload flagging, the lead-time warnings, the marketing-lead approval gate, and the CSV export by month and quarter. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a full "No API yet?" path that uses a Google Sheet / CSV as the data source and produces a clean CSV export — so you can build and run the whole thing this afternoon with nothing but a spreadsheet of holidays.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

Even a planning tool deserves real controls, because the approved annual map is something the whole team commits to. The plan builds in login so only your marketing team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's plan, a complete audit trail of who changed which theme and who approved the map, a hard human-approval gate so the proposed seasonal map doesn't become "the plan" until the marketing lead signs off, and duplicate guards (keyed on theme + month) so the same themed slot can't be added twice when you re-import or tweak.

Who it's for

Marketing managers, marketing-ops leads, and content/brand owners who run annual or quarterly planning — especially anyone tired of rediscovering holidays too late, missing their own industry's events, or watching campaigns pile up in one month while another sits empty. If you can list the dates that matter to your audience and roughly how far ahead your big campaigns need to start, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll have your whole year mapped out on one screen before the afternoon's done.