For many media planning professionals, a media plan isn’t a plan until every dollar is allocated to a media vehicle. If the client wants to spend $500,000 this quarter, you had best have all $500,000 planned for one vehicle or another–it must go someplace.
For others, there’s a distinct advantage to having a certain percentage of the media budget set aside for media opportunities that may come up during the course of the quarter. On many of the plans I’ve put together over my career, I’ve placed a small percentage of the plan’s dollars into an “Opportunistic Media Fund” to cover such scenarios.