Why deliverables exist
In a chat window, "the email" your AI wrote is a blob of text. On a Plainpaper board it's a deliverable: a card type with a defined structure, checked on every write. An email card is a validated artifact with a subject, a preheader, and the real HTML. Approving it means something because you approve the artifact itself, not a description of one. If your agent tries to save an email without a subject, the write is rejected and the error tells it exactly what a proper email card needs, so it can fix the card without pulling you in.
There are three deliverable types today: email campaigns, ad and channel creative, and results charts. Everything else on a board is a regular free-form card; see Cards & connections.
Email campaigns
The email card is a ready-to-send marketing email. Its fields are the ones an email actually has: a subject (a single, final subject line), a preheader, and an optional from-name and reply-to. The body is the email: the HTML your readers will receive, shown in a safe rendered preview inside the card, so what you review is what lands in the inbox.
Images in the email live as board assets, stored privately in Plainpaper rather than linked from somewhere on the web. If your agent doesn't have an image yet, the email shows a visible placeholder slot in its place, and that slot blocks approval until the real image is in. More on this in Assets & media.
Draft the launch email for our summer reading bundles as a complete email card on my "Summer sale" board in Plainpaper: one final subject line, a preheader, and the full HTML body. Use a placeholder slot for any image you don't have yet.
For the full workflow (brief, draft, review, approve), see Draft email campaigns.
Ad & channel creative
The creative card is the finished media and copy for one placement: an ad in a feed, or a message on a channel. It comes in five shapes:
- Single image
- One image plus the copy that runs with it.
- Video
- A standard video ad.
- Carousel
- 2 to 10 cards, each with its own image and optional headline and link.
- Vertical video
- Full-screen 9:16 video for Reels, Stories, and TikTok.
- Message
- A WhatsApp template or an SMS, sent on a channel instead of run as an ad.
For review, a creative is staged in realistic mockup frames: Facebook Feed, Instagram Feed, Reels, and Stories, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, WhatsApp, and SMS. The frame shows the creative the way that surface will, including where the copy truncates, so "headline too long for TikTok" is something you catch during review, before launch. The mockup only affects how you preview the creative. What ships is the media and the copy, unchanged.
Stage the summer-sale creative as an Instagram Reel. Then make a sibling variant of it staged as a TikTok ad, with the same video and the same copy, and tell me where the copy truncates in each frame.
To be approved, a creative needs at least one mockup, and the ad shapes additionally need a CTA and a destination URL. An ad with nowhere to click isn't fit to ship.
Deliberately not on the card: budget, targeting, and schedule. A creative holds only the media and the copy. Budgets, audiences, and timing live on their own cards, connected to the creative on the board, so each can be reviewed and changed on its own.
The step-by-step version lives in Create ad creative.
Results & charts
The results card closes the loop: the board that held the plan also holds the result. It renders either KPI tiles or a bar chart. The front of the card is the written insight, what the numbers mean, and the back is the rendered chart itself.
Your agent brings the numbers. Plainpaper doesn't fetch analytics from your email or ad platforms. Your agent reads them through your own connections, then writes the result card on the board.
Flippable cards
Email, creative, and results cards flip right on the canvas: the front is a one-line summary, the back is the rendered artifact (the actual email, the creative in its frame, the chart). It's the fastest way to review a campaign: skim the fronts to see the shape of the work, then flip the cards that matter.
How your agent knows the format
Before writing anything, your agent discovers each deliverable's exact structure straight from the board: which fields exist, which are required, how assets must be handled, and the authoring rules that come with the type. It reads the contract first instead of guessing what an email card looks like. So asking for "an email" reliably comes back as a proper, complete email card, even in a fresh session with no chat history to lean on.