• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 30, 2024

It's interesting to see how smaller companies have branched out, adding focus in order to become a large agency.

Crissi Cupak, vice president of products at Skai, has worked for the market intelligence and measurement technology company since 2013, but I began covering the company as Kenshoo around 2010-ish when Aaron Goldman, now CMO at Mediaocean, ran marketing.

Skai has been in tune with numbers, analytics, search trends and social for years, but now the company has decided to support media buyers.

The company typically publishes a quarterly media report titled the Digital Marketing Quarterly Trends Report. 

The latest data is from the fourth quarter of 2023. It is an in-depth analysis of digital marketing trends that defined the quarter, published with an interactive infographic detailing key analysis.

The holiday surge between October and December of 2023 drove quarter-over-quarter spending higher in all channels.

Retail media led the surge at more than 27% year-over-year (YoY), paid social at more than 15%, while paid search lagged at more than 4%.

The most recent report includes TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn in its paid-social analysis, so growth rates may not be directly comparable to previous reports.

Not surprising, based on the data, Cupak on Tuesday announced the launch of Skai Decision Pro, calling it the first solution specifically for the media executives to oversee and carry out advertising programs across any channel and publisher.

Media executives need to make decisions on consumer behavior and campaign performance. They oversee teams as specialists of search or paid media and need to optimize across those channels. It’s all to make smarter spend decision in the way media is bought.

The set of four features -- which about 10 clients had access to during development in the past year -- are now bundled into one. Hewlett-Packard uses this bundle to monitor performance of media buys and campaigns.

Ainara Sancho, head of retail media EMEA at Hewlett Packard, says when someone "throws a question" her way she can answer it with hesitation. 

The hub enables the head of media to visualize and oversee media performance and spend across all channels, including paid search, paid social, retail media, apps, display, and connected TV.

When using the tools alongside Skai’s buying solutions, marketers can tap into the power of AI for data-backed decisions and predictive media planning to gain visibility, trust and control of investment decisions. 

Here’s an example of how artificial intelligence (AI) is used for media planning. One of the features known as Spotlights consist of AI-powered alerts that recognizes anomalies and other significant spend and performance changes to highlight potential opportunities or threats, accelerating smart decision-making.

There’s an AI forecasting tool for predictive analysis tool that lets users quickly visualize and understand what impact budget changes will have on their media performance and business results, enabling users to better decide how budgets should be allocated across channels for maximum impact.

Media plans is a tool to organize, centralize, and visualize monthly and multi-month budgets in one place, this makes even the most complex budgets easier to track and forecast using Executive HQ and Media Forecasting.