Driving Retail Media Innovation with Skai's Nich Weinheimer

Over the past decade at Skai, as we've built our retail media business and aligned our enterprise advertising/marketing technology together in one unified platform, we have infused “retail intelligence” into our approach. And with clients looking to align a variety of “jobs to be done” for managing their retail and media initiatives – especially on channels like Amazon that command north of 70% of the market share – we are being asked to do more than just integrate first and third-party data sources to inform activation. The signals and solutions for strategic digital shelf, marketplace organic and operational reporting, ticketing automation, creative optimization, and revenue recovery are all adjacent and of great importance for context or for direct input into media activation. So as we increasingly see RFPs seek alignment across all these solutions, we believe that having a best-of-breed suite of powered-by solutions available via one contract with Skai will allow the market to enjoy streamlined access to innovation.

 

High-stakes seasons/events command a lot of budget and attention, so it’s key to nail the strategy and have access to the right information in order to better approach the competition or the nuances of the category. Aligning the myriad signals coming from competition intradaily can help ensure that your event days are as successful as possible. Content optimization gives you the tools to ensure you aren't missing traffic because you aren't indexing for terms that consumers are using to find products with value propositions like yours; this is of great importance especially when you're in high-traffic events. Additionally, expanding into new adjacent categories may mean adjusting content to attract and convert shoppers in growth categories.

 

It's fairly straightforward: If you're not in the buy box, you are missing sales. Controlling your brand presence and any gray-market sellers of your brand is a critical challenge to solve to ensure you aren't losing organic sales or paying for traffic that other sellers are capitalizing on. Keyword trends are important to track as volume shifts and new terms surface that may fit your category or product; it's important to know and estimate volume and stay abreast of trends to ensure your campaigns and organic sales are as competitive as possible. 

 

Ultimately, recovered revenue – less the fees for the service – are funds that can be used to improve the bottom line of the business and to reinvest in inventory, ads, teams, or technology. Ensuring Amazon and other retailers are remunerating your brand correctly is simply smart business and AR practice.
 

Our clients are often leveraging our algorithmic “what-if” scenario tools to decide how to shift existing or incremental budgets between channels and/or tactics. Increasingly with Celeste AI (Skai’s groundbreaking GenAI agent purpose-built for commerce media), our clients are discovering effects of interaction between disparate channels -- like Youtube and Amazon -- and leveraging the AI agent’s ability to run complex regressions in a matter of seconds.

 

Trust. Transparency. Legal compliance and infosec. And then from there, it’s understanding how the agent or specific AI toolset has been “coached” to understand context, client specifics, and the jobs to be done.