What is Skeleton Key?

Skeleton Key is a marketing platform that puts coordinated AI agents to work on the part of marketing where direction gets set: research, strategy, and planning. Most marketing technology concentrates on executing media once the decisions are made. Skeleton Key works upstream of that, on the thinking that decides what the media should do in the first place. You bring a brand and a campaign objective; the agents produce citation-backed research, strategy, and media planning outputs; you review, refine, and direct them.

A research dossier, a four-part strategy, and a tactical media plan that would take days or weeks to produce manually take under 30 minutes end to end. And the work compounds: everything the agents produce, and everything you upload, feeds a knowledge base the brand keeps.

The core workflow

Five steps, run in order.

1. Brand Profile: Provide your brand details once. The Brand Profiler agent enriches them with web research and, optionally, any documents you upload. Takes about 2-3 minutes.
2. Campaign: Create a campaign brief inside the brand. A single brand can hold as many campaigns as you need.
3. Research: Five analyst agents (Category, Competitor, Consumer, Culture, Social) cover different angles of market intelligence. About 3-4 minutes. You can optionally synthesize their findings into a one-pager and a narrative report (another 4-5 minutes).
4. Strategy: Four strategists (Goals, Audience, Communication, Media) build on the research outputs, then a Strategy Summary unifies them into a single executive document. About 7-8 minutes for the strategists, plus another 2-3 for the summary. Audience sizes are grounded in live advertising-platform data: Meta's for consumer campaigns, LinkedIn's for B2B.
5. Media Plan: A unified tactical plan rendered as three on-page sections: a plan overview, budget-distribution charts, and seven detail tabs (markets, flighting, channels, audiences, landing URLs, goals, pillars). URLs auto-generate UTM tracking per channel-tactic-format. About 6-8 minutes.

You can run the three campaign phases one at a time, or dispatch Research, Strategy, and Media Plan back-to-back as a single end-to-end chain from the campaign page. Research can also run at the brand level without a campaign; Strategy and Media Plan are always campaign-scoped. Every output is citation-backed, so any claim can be traced to the research run, uploaded document, or public source behind it. When an output misses the mark, Refine takes written feedback and re-runs only what needs to change, with every version kept in history.

The knowledge layer

The longer you work in Skeleton Key, the more it knows. The Wiki compiles everything from your inputs and the agents' outputs into a browsable directory of the brand: competitors, audiences, channels, products, campaigns, and trends, each with an evidence-backed page. Brand Maps draws the same knowledge as a graph, linking insights to strategies to tactics across phases. Chat answers questions from the same knowledge, citing the Wiki pages it draws on, on the page you're reading or across the whole brand at once.

This is what separates the platform from a one-shot generator. A second campaign doesn't start from zero; it starts from what the first one learned.

Presenting and measuring

When an output is ready to leave the platform, Pages turns it into an interactive web page and Slides turns it into a presentation-ready deck, both styled with your organization's or brand's design kit when one exists. Outputs also download directly as PDF, Word, Markdown, or Excel depending on the output type.

On the measurement side, the Marketing Mix Model works from your own history rather than agent research: upload your spend and outcome data, and it estimates what each channel actually contributed, with an honest trust layer on every result. When a completed model exists for the brand, attach its results to a Strategy run and the findings ground the goals and channel recommendations in measured reality.

Who it's for

Skeleton Key is most useful for marketers and agency teams who have the context to evaluate and refine AI-generated outputs. That means someone who can look at a set of Goals and say "these don't fit our business model" or read a media strategy and push back on the channel mix. The platform is not a black box that generates finished work on autopilot. It is a structured workflow that handles the research volume and document assembly so you can spend your time on judgment calls. Smaller teams wearing many hats will get more out of it than large teams with dedicated research staff.

The product is in beta. Outputs are strong but not infallible, and you should validate citations and assumptions before briefing teams or committing budgets.

Where to go next

If you want to run through the full workflow end to end, the Quickstart walks you from brand setup to a finished media plan in 30 minutes. If you want to understand the underlying structure first (how orgs, brands, campaigns, and runs relate to each other), Core concepts covers that model before you start.