Published by isobel.regans@dontpanicprojects.com
Published Date 08.08.2022 
Everyone at Skai was excited to learn that we are a finalist at this year’s European Commerce Awards for Best eCommerce Software or Extension of the Year!
This is a fantastic honour and opportunity for others to recognise the mountain of work our teams have put in over the years to ensure our Retail Media solution is one of the best on the planet.
Retail media advertising is now a critical part of ecommerce
For years, our name has been synonymous with the leading marketing technology companies in the world. In 2006, Skai, then known as Kenshoo, was one of the first paid search platforms to hit the market. Then, in 2010, we launched our social advertising solution.
As ecommerce began to truly bloom and online retailers started offering advertising, we knew we had to get involved. Using what we learned from our paid search and social advertising experience, we launched our Retail Media solution beginning with Amazon Ads in 2017. Today, our clients represent some of the largest European brands and agencies.
Then along came the pandemic. With people stuck at home, ecommerce doubled in size in 2020 and continues to outpace all previous expectations. Retail media immediately become even more essential to ecommerce success. Today, it is the third-largest digital advertising channel, and some experts believe that it may overtake social advertising by 2030.
Reaching and engaging customers within online stores represents a significant change from just a few short years ago. Before retail media, marketers could only drive users to their owned websites and apps, and hope that their influence would persist when users went to their online retailer of choice. Now, just like shopper marketing helps brands reach consumers while in physical stores, retail media is driving user purchase behavior much closer to the point of purchase.
The evolution of Kenshoo to Skai
In 2021, we rebranded from Kenshoo to Skai. Our new name better reflects our ongoing mission to go beyond just helping our clients better manage their ecommerce programs to truly becoming a full partner in their success. That means evolving from basic campaign management to assisting marketers in getting smarter through meaningful data and insights.
Skai helps marketers make more intelligent decisions with best-in-class data features and partnerships. With Skai’s neutral, agnostic position and 100+ integrations with leading ad vendors, marketers can marry the right data that identifies and actions those holistic insights.
“This is a turning point for the world, and we are answering the call of our partners and clients by building a complete intelligent go-to-market engine that aids more aspects of the process, from data to insight to action to validation and growth,” says Skai’s CEO and Co-Founder Yoav Izhar-Prato. “Our clients have been asking for it—executive leadership, brand managers, consumer insights analysts, and media specialists alike—and we’re humbled to be able to deliver after seeing great initial results.”
Skai’s cutting-edge retail media innovation
As part of Skai’s omnichannel marketing platform, our Retail Media solution empowers brands to plan, execute, and measure digital campaigns that meet consumers when and where they shop. Built with best-in-class automation and optimization capabilities, our unified platform allows you to manage campaigns on 30+ retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart, all in one place.
Today’s ecommerce marketers are dealing with more complexities than ever before. On top of industry table stakes features like bidding and budget management, keyword harvesting, bulk actions, dayparting, dashboards, reporting, and others that you’d expect from a retail media platform, Skai offers much more. With innovative and proprietary capabilities, Skai drives ecommerce growth beyond any other platform.
Recently, Skai rolled out a first-of-its-kind extension to Facebook’s Collection Ads, Dynamic Commerce Ads. They allow advertisers to customize each piece of a social ad, pulling metadata for things like reviews, price, and availability, and letting the customer choose which retailer to purchase from. Advertisers no longer have to choose between efficiency and effectiveness.
With Skai’s Amazon Attribution, ecommerce marketers can quickly connect the dots between other paid media and Amazon sales, to understand the correlation of marketing efforts to sales. Amazon Attribution offers insight into the path to purchase and paints the picture of the ideal connected commerce media mix.
Skai’s Automated Actions help marketers save time by efficiently streamlining campaign management, even cross-channel campaign management. Automated Actions enables ecommerce advertisers to automate campaign optimizations like creative, status, bids, and budgets, based on customizable rules such as performance trends, weather signals, spend changes, and more. The time saved, efficiency gained, and optimizations implemented accelerate performance across ecommerce programs.
To measure cross-channel performance and quantify incremental value, Skai’s solution is Impact Navigator. Skai offers complete incrementality measurement and controlled experiments so ecommerce clients can test and learn to drive successful marketing omnichannel programs led by data-driven decision-making.
Skai also supports Amazon features essential to endemic and non-endemic brand growth, like its Demand Side Platform (DSP) and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), supplementing the offerings of the native platform. With a sophisticated solution like Skai, ecommerce brands and agencies can achieve results beyond what they can do alone such as faster time to cross-channel action, efficiencies in management, and optimisations to scale media mix strategy.
Only Skai truly moves the needle and sets the gold standard for the ecommerce industry.
We look forward to the award announcements and wish all finalists luck in their categories.
