How The Barcode Group Cut Reporting Time 75% and Accelerated Annual Planning with Celeste AI

A large home furnishing brand was overburdened by reporting that was slowing
their vital strategic work. They needed a partner to execute their end-to-end retail
media advertising efforts, including report generation.

The company partnered with The Barcode Group, a CPG sales and marketing agency helping brands grow through retail strategy, data analytics and omnichannel and research services for partners like Walmart, Target, Costco and Amazon.

By deploying Skai Celeste, Skai’s GenAI-powered marketing agent, The Barcode Group reduced advanced report compilation time and redirected that capacity toward forecasting, research, and strategic campaign planning.

The Barcode Group’s team managing the brand was doing good work, but too much of their time was going toward assembling data instead of using it.

Home furnishings is a category where a handful of shopping events can determine the shape of an entire year. For the brand, Prime Day and other major retail moments carried significant weight in quarterly performance, which meant the agency needed reliable, detailed historical data to make credible recommendations to the client.

Getting that data was harder than it should have been. Amazon’s native reporting capped the lookback window at 90 days, making year-over-year and multi-event comparisons difficult to produce. Analysts had to pull multiple reports and manually consolidate data sets just to answer basic planning questions. Each comparison took hours.

As the account grew and the calendar filled with key events and planning deadlines, the reporting workload grew with it. The team was spending more time building reports than acting on them.

The Barcode Group equipped its team with Skai Celeste, GenAI-powered marketing agent, to replace the manual process that had been slowing the team down.

Instead of pulling and combining data exports, analysts prompted Celeste directly. Celeste synthesized answers from the full data set and surfaced AI-generated insights without requiring the team to build the underlying analysis themselves.

Celeste also gave the team access to Amazon Ads historical data well beyond the 90-day native window. For an account where seasonal performance shaped annual planning, that access changed what the agency could see and, by extension, what they could advise. Rather than evaluating each Prime Event in isolation, the team used Celeste to compare performance across multiple events, identify year-over-year patterns, and validate planning assumptions with data they had not previously been able to reach.

The time the team recovered went directly into client work. Analysts shifted from compiling reports to interpreting findings and building recommendations. The resulting analysis became a core input into the home furnishing brand’s 2026 planning process, informing both forecasting and campaign development.

• 75% reduction in advanced report compilation time, freeing the team from hours of manual data work each reporting cycle.
• Analyst capacity redirected from data consolidation to forecasting, ad creative research, and annual campaign planning for the brand
• Expanded historical view for seasonal planning, giving the agency access to multi-year Prime Event comparisons that Amazon’s native reporting could not support.

The efficiency gains freed The Barcode Group’s team to shift from data compilation to strategic advisory work, a direct change in how the agency delivered value to their client.

The Barcode Group is an end-to-end partner for brands growing across brick-and-mortar retail and digital marketplaces. The agency brokers retail relationships and drives marketplace strategy and advertising, all backed by data analytics and more than 30 years of experience. The Barcode Group helps brands translate marketplace data into profitable, scalable growth.