Response curves vs. heuristics

Most media planning still runs on rules of thumb — a 60/40 brand-to-performance split, a frequency cap of three, a reflex to buy TV first. They're guesses that hardened into convention.

What a heuristic hides

A rule of thumb is an average borrowed from someone else's market, frozen in time. It can't tell you where your channels saturate, how they interact, or what this particular plan will return. It optimises for looking reasonable in a meeting — not for the outcome on the other side of the spend.

A rule of thumb is an average from someone else's market, frozen in time.

What a curve adds

A response curve is fit to your data — your campaigns, your category, your market — and recalibrated every cycle. It carries the shape of diminishing returns, so a plan can find the efficient point on each channel instead of defaulting to a number someone once wrote on a slide. The split stops being a belief and becomes a result.

Removing the rules on purpose

Curvio models every KPI as a sum of calibrated curves, fit with Bayesian methods on real campaign data. We took the heuristics out deliberately — not because rules of thumb are always wrong, but because you can't stand behind an outcome you only guessed at. Math you can audit beats convention you can't.