What you'll be able to do
- Build the per-market campaign architecture that holds at 15-40 dates
- Run the weekly war room that moves money to gaps in twenty minutes
- Name campaigns so that date thirty-one doesn't require archaeology
The short version: The structure: one tour campaign per objective layer, one ad set per market inside it (the legitimate geo split, from DAS 201 M5 - markets are genuinely different delivery problems), shared creative backbone deployed per-market via dynamic date/venue lines. Budget runs as a portfolio: the weekly war room reads every market's sellthrough against its curve and tier, moves money to gaps, throttles near-sellouts, and logs the moves. Naming conventions carry the whole thing - at forty dates,
TOUR26 - [MKT] - [PHASE]is the difference between an operation and a crime scene.
The architecture
- Campaign layer = objective. The tour typically runs three: the announce/awareness layer (wave weeks), the conversion layer (on-sale through final 72, per-market ad sets), and the sustain trickle (the long middle). Not per-market campaigns - per-market AD SETS inside shared campaigns, so learning consolidates while geo splits (DAS 100 M4's fragmentation doctrine, obeyed at scale).
- The market ad set carries: the market geo (buyer-zip informed where history exists - DAS 201 M5), the market-tagged warm audiences, and the market's budget line. Everything else - creative, optimization event, structure - is tour-uniform.
- Creative deploys from the backbone (Module 7): shared spine assets with per-market date/venue/ticket-link variants. The announce post ID doctrine per Module 2's matrix: shared with coordinated promoters, tour-owned elsewhere.
- Cross-border legs get the boring checklist: currency per ad account reality, time-zone-correct scheduling (an on-sale that fires at 10am YOUR time is a 4pm surprise in the market), and consent/messaging rules that Module 5 handles for the alert layer.
The war room (weekly, 20-30 minutes, non-negotiable)
The sheet: one row per market - sellthrough % · the market's curve position (from its venue/promoter history where the matrix delivered it, tour-average curve where it didn't) · tier (Module 6's anchor/growth/experiment) · this week's spend · the move. The ritual:
- Gaps get money. Behind-curve markets take budget from ahead-of-curve markets. The 40% market is the priority; the 85% market is the donor.
- Near-sellouts get throttled. Paying to oversell a room annoys a promoter and wastes the exact dollars the gap market needs (DAS 202 M8's rule, on a schedule).
- Tiers set the panic threshold. An experiment market at 55% may be fine; an anchor market at 55% is the week's headline. The tier column keeps the war room from treating all forty rooms as equally alarming.
- Moves get logged. One line per move, because the post-tour debrief (Module 9) reconstructs the tour from this log - and because "why is Phoenix at $0" deserves a better answer than a shrug in week nine.
›Go deeper: when markets share vs split
The per-market ad set is the default, with two principled exceptions. Share (collapse markets into one regional ad set) when: markets are small, adjacent, and drive-connected (the two-hour-radius cluster where one show's real market spans both cities), or when a market's budget is too small to exit learning alone (DAS 100 M5's math - a $200 market inside a regional set learns; alone it flails). Split further (market → multiple sets) almost never - the one case is a genuine two-audience city (the college submarket vs the scene submarket with different creative), and even then, prefer creative variety inside one set and let retrieval sort it (DAS 100 M6). The test is always learning volume per set, never tidiness.
From the field
A 22-date fall run, war-roomed weekly from week one. Week three: two Midwest growth markets sat 15+ points behind curve while two coastal anchors ran hot. The sheet moved $1,800 across four rows in one sitting - and the log line read "MKE/DET behind, BOS/DC throttled, rebalance #1." By week seven the Midwest pair had closed to curve; by close, twenty of twenty-two hit target, and the two that missed were experiment-tier rooms the debrief flagged honestly as routing reaches, not marketing failures - distinguishable ONLY because the tiers and the log existed. The war room's entire cost across the tour: about four hours of one person's attention. It was the highest-ROI four hours on the P&L.
Common mistakes
- Per-market CAMPAIGNS (fragmenting learning forty ways) instead of per-market ad sets
- Budget set at announce, moved never
- The war room skipped in busy weeks (busy weeks are when markets diverge)
- No tier column - every soft market a five-alarm fire, every week
- Unlogged moves (week nine's mysteries, self-inflicted)
Take-home
The War Room Weekly Sheet - the full column template, the four-step ritual card, the share-vs-split decision rules, and the cross-border checklist.
Sources & dates
DAS 100 M4-M6 + DAS 201 M5 cross-references as cited · war-room system is Darkroom practice, presented as such
Learn more
Optional extra credit. Nothing below is required for the quiz, the certificate, or the job - the full lesson is above. This is for the sickos who want more.
- DAS 201 Module 5's multi-market ritual - the single-tour-leg version this module scales