Independent marketing agency Brunner has acquired AdSkate, an AI-powered creative analytics platform that breaks down ad performance across images, video, messaging and audience segments to identify which creative elements are actually driving engagement and conversion. Terms were not disclosed. AdSkate’s co-founders join Brunner directly: CEO Akaash Ramakrishnan becomes Senior Director of AI and Innovation, and CTO Shreyas Venugopalan joins as an AI and Technology Consultant, alongside new hire Max Rosen as Creative Technologist.
The deal matters because it marks agencies buying creative intelligence as a standalone capability rather than licensing it from a platform vendor. “Marketing is entering a new era where creative intelligence is becoming just as important as media intelligence,” said Kevin Amos, Brunner’s partner and chief media/data officer. That framing puts creative analysis on equal footing with the media-buying data stack agencies have spent the past several years building or acquiring, a pattern already visible in holding companies buying their way into the data layer.
The original insight here is about where the acquisition price sits: AdSkate is a client-facing analytics tool with named enterprise customers, including Infosys, Abbott Labs and Illinois Lottery, not an internal prototype Brunner built and is now formalizing. Buying an already-commercial platform, rather than building creative-scoring capability in-house, signals that mid-size independent agencies see the AI-creative-analytics market moving too fast to build for internally, the same urgency already showing up in agentic ad creative’s first public ROI numbers. Albert Thompson, managing digital director at client agency Walton Isaacson, called AdSkate’s performance breakdown “truly empowering,” a signal that agencies now expect creative-level attribution as a baseline capability, not a differentiator.
Source: PR Newswire
