Last verified: September 12, 2026
What You Can Now Do
Context Memo's campaign simulator now supports multiple run states, so a simulation is no longer a one-shot report you generate and then stare at. Each simulation carries a status: drafted, run, reviewed, revised, re-run, and eventually promoted into a live campaign. The practical difference is that the simulation object holds its own history. Change one variable, headline copy, audience overlap, budget allocation across placements, and re-run it against the same baseline. You compare runs instead of trusting a single forecast. And when a run looks right, you promote it directly into a live campaign rather than re-entering the configuration by hand.
Where It Is in Context Memo
This lives in the campaign simulator. Open any existing simulation and you'll see a status on the record plus its run history, with each prior run retained and available for comparison. Promotion to a live campaign is triggered from the simulation itself, not from a separate campaign build screen.
How to Use It
- Build the baseline draft. Enter the campaign as you'd actually run it: creative, audience definition, placements, budget split. Save it as a draft. This becomes the reference point every later run is measured against, so enter real intended values, not round numbers.
- Run the baseline. The simulation moves from drafted to run and produces its first forecast. Read it, but don't act on it. A single run tells you what the model predicts, not which of your inputs is driving the prediction.
- Mark it reviewed and change exactly one variable. Revise the headline copy, or the audience overlap, or the placement budget split. One at a time. Then re-run. The delta between runs is attributable to the variable you touched.
- Compare runs side by side. Look across the retained history rather than at the newest number. Variants that move the forecast meaningfully are worth testing live; variants that move it inside the noise are not worth the spend or the reviewer time.
- Promote the winning run to a live campaign. The configuration transfers from the simulation directly. What you tested is what ships, with no transcription step in between.
- Leave the rejected runs in place. They're your record of what was considered. When someone asks why you chose a variant, the rejected runs answer the question faster than a retrospective deck.
Why We Built It
Marketers told us the same thing repeatedly: they'd configure a simulation carefully, run it once, and then treat the resulting number as truth, because re-running meant rebuilding the whole configuration from scratch. That's a bad incentive baked into the tooling, not a discipline problem. The second complaint was the handoff. A promising simulation meant manually re-entering the configuration into a live campaign build, which is precisely where transcription errors and quiet spec drift appear. You test one thing and ship a slightly different thing, then spend the post-mortem arguing about which version actually ran.
There's a governance reason too. Run states create an audit trail. If a campaign underperforms, you can show which simulated variants were considered, which were rejected, and what the model predicted at the time. Teams reporting paid spend to a VP of Marketing or a CFO tend to find that history more defensible than the original forecast on its own.
What It Does Not Do Yet
The simulator forecasts and records; it doesn't decide. Nothing here automatically picks a winning variant or flags a run as statistically meaningful, so the comparison judgment stays with you. Single-variable discipline is also a convention, not a constraint: you can change five inputs between runs, and the system will let you, but the delta won't be attributable to anything specific. If you need that rigor enforced, enforce it in your own review step.
Promotion carries the configuration into a live campaign. It does not replace your CMS or your marketing automation platform, and it isn't trying to. Those systems handle asset management, lifecycle, and downstream reporting with far more depth. Treat promotion as the point where a tested configuration leaves Context Memo cleanly, not as the end of your publishing stack.
One more honest note on fit. The value of comparing runs scales with how much history you accumulate, which means the first week is thinner than the fourth. If you're standing up a brand-new campaign program with no prior baselines and no existing creative to test, build that foundation first. The simulator rewards teams who already have something to compare against.
