The last week of the month
A consumer brand client expects a coverage book on the first working day of each month. The account executive opens last month's deck, duplicates it, deletes the old slides and starts again. One slide per piece: clipping, title logo, headline, date, a line on the key message. Pieces are grouped by campaign, then by national, regional, trade and online. The client's head of communications likes a summary slide at the front with counts by type.
Two days later the deck is done. The account director spots a piece in the wrong campaign, a logo from the wrong regional title and a headline with a typo copied from the spreadsheet. Fixing it takes another afternoon. Next month, the same.
Why the book is rebuilt from nothing
- Coverage lives in a spreadsheet and clippings in a folder, and the deck is a third copy of both.
- Every client wants a different structure: by campaign, by product, by spokesperson, by region.
- Logos and masthead images are hunted for each time.
- Summary counts are done by hand, so they rarely match the slides exactly.
- Commentary, which is the valuable part, gets written last and in a rush.
How coverage is measured and what counts as a good result is a separate debate, and many agencies follow the AMEC framework rather than advertising value equivalents. The build supports whatever measures your agency and client have agreed, and does not invent any.
Where the time goes
Nearly all of the effort goes on assembly and very little on thinking. Clients read the commentary and the summary; they skim the rest. Yet the commentary is squeezed into the last hour. Errors in the assembled deck are also visible to the client in a way that undermines otherwise good work.
How we build the coverage book generator
- We take your agency's existing PowerPoint template and turn the slide layouts into ones the generator can fill: cover, summary, section divider, coverage slide, broadcast slide.
- Each client has a book profile: how pieces are grouped, which fields appear on each slide, and which measures go on the summary.
- The generator reads confirmed coverage and finished clippings from your coverage record for the chosen dates, fills the layouts and adds masthead logos from a shared library.
- Summary slides are calculated from the same data as the pieces, so counts always match.
- Blank commentary boxes are left on the summary and on campaign dividers for the account team, with optional AI draft notes from OpenAI or Anthropic Claude marked clearly as drafts.
- The output is a normal PowerPoint file and a PDF, which the team can edit freely before sending.
| Part of the book | Filled by |
|---|---|
| Coverage slides | Generator, from confirmed coverage and clippings |
| Masthead logos | Generator, from the logo library |
| Summary counts and measures | Generator, from the same data |
| Grouping and order | Client book profile |
| Commentary and recommendations | Account team |
Month end, done differently
On the last working day the executive chooses the client and the dates and generates the book. It opens as a full deck in PowerPoint in the agency template. She checks the flagged items, fixes one grouping and spends the rest of the morning with the account director writing what the month meant and what they will do next month.
Mid-month, the director can generate a quick interim book before a client meeting in minutes, because the data is already there.
If this is you
- Coverage books take days to build each month.
- Slides are copied from a spreadsheet and a clippings folder.
- Summary numbers do not always match the pages behind them.
- Masthead logos are searched for every time.
- Commentary is written at the last minute.