StratifAI Product Guide

Getting Started with StratifAI

How StratifAI works, what each tool does, and how to move from your brief to a data-grounded media plan.

Introduction

Media planners work under constant time pressure, often with limited bandwidth. Planning also demands large volumes of data to analyse, multiple scenarios to simulate, and a fair amount of estimation.

StratifAI is built to solve exactly this. It speeds up budget allocation decisions, handles the heavy data processing, and grounds every simulation in data. The platform supports planning across the full funnel, covering everything from cross-channel budget allocation and optimisation to forecasting competitive moves and driving performance.

Built on years of media planning experience and established reach and calibration logic, StratifAI optimises budget allocation against channel thresholds while accounting for deduplicated audiences across platforms, so your spend stays efficient.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is where you enter your brief and scoring inputs. Each section below feeds the planning tools that follow.

Campaign Brief

This is where you enter all your requirements. Use the standardised templates to provide your brand requirements, campaign and media objectives, and any other relevant details.

Business Pulse

This section captures a deeper view of the business beyond media. It strengthens the final output by connecting budget allocation to business objectives, and can be completed jointly by the brand and the agency where helpful. Details such as brand positioning and brand health within the category feed into AI scoring, which refines the media output in later stages.

Enter your inputs based on your own understanding, or paste your brand profile directly into the AI chat.

Brand Voice

Beyond business objectives, it is important to understand the strength and complexity of the creative messaging. This determines the level of amplification needed to drive engagement, stickiness, and recall.

Consider questions such as: Does the brand have multiple creatives? Is the messaging easy to understand? Is it similar to competitors’ messaging? Is it more emotionally led or more transactional?

Enter your scores based on your understanding. If the brand does not yet have a communication strategy or defined messaging, select the closest match.

Media Execution

After you define the brief and enter your Business Pulse and Brand Voice scores, the Media Execution section factors in media nuances such as Ad Noise and past campaign burst information (channel distribution) into the budget allocation outputs. For example, a festive period carries high clutter and therefore higher ad noise.

This helps establish the right reach and frequency levels across relevant channels to improve and deliver better performance.

Reach Planner

This tool answers simple but critical questions that are often estimated using siloed data: What is the right level of spend across channels to reach your audience without overspending? How do you balance reach against frequency while accounting for audience duplication across channels?

The tool indicates the effective frequency your campaign should run to achieve optimal exposure. This is calibrated from your inputs across Business Pulse, Brand Voice, and Media Execution.

Step-by-step approach

  1. Build proxy reach curves from your typical platforms, such as Meta, DV360, TikTok, and TV.
    • Ideally, split the reach curves by platform and format type (for example, Facebook Video, Facebook Display, Instagram Video, DV360 Display, DV360 Video, and YouTube).
    • At a minimum, each curve should include impressions, reach per platform, R1+, and average frequency.
  2. Add your target CPM for each platform.
  3. Based on the frequency StratifAI suggests (or your own target frequency), include additional R+ data points to refine the target. For example, if the suggested frequency is 4.5–5x, run the reach curves to include R1+, R2+, R3+, R4+, and R5+.
  4. Upload the file to the tool. The tool returns the minimum and maximum spend required per platform.
  5. Based on the suggested spend, the tool automatically calibrates estimated performance, accounting for deduplicated reach across platforms.

Forecast Tool

This tool helps agencies and marketers forecast competitor spend and provides directional guidance on marketing budgets. Use it to defend your brand’s position within the category, or to understand where your brand would stand with a fixed activation budget.

The forecasting tool uses a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model to map the directional relationship between Spend, SOV, and SOM through a lagged response model. It then simulates three business scenarios: Target SOV, Budget, and Winning on SOM.

Because raw model outputs can become unrealistic, particularly for SOM-growth targets, StratifAI applies policy-based caps for maximum SOV, SOM uplift, and spend growth. A final enforcer clamps the outputs after each AI run and rebuilds the reporting sheets, so the dashboard shows realistic, consistent results. At this stage, the tool is best used as a directional planning simulator rather than a precise market-share prediction engine.

Step-by-step approach

  1. Upload raw data in Excel format, including brands, platforms, month, year, spend, impressions, revenue, and share of market.
  2. Select the objective you want the system to run against.
  3. The system calibrates a suggested output based on that objective.
  4. Optionally, run the simulation against your competitors. For example, if you expect a competitor to launch a new campaign and increase their budget, select that competitor brand and simulate the scenario to understand the impact on share of market or share of voice.

Performance Tool

Agencies and brands often work toward specific sales or growth targets.

In the past, planners and marketers had to work through report after report to assemble a larger report and understand the impact of their marketing spend on those targets.

With StratifAI, you can upload these reports directly to the system, which calibrates the right level of budget to reach a target growth, drive ROAS, or achieve SOM targets.

The tool is a flexible media-to-conversion planning engine. It detects the report type automatically based on the uploaded file:

  • If the file contains fields such as Total Orders, Add to Cart, and Revenue, it is treated as a commerce report.
  • If it contains conversion fields without the commerce fields, it is treated as a generic conversion report.
  • The tool then validates only the fields required for that report type. For example, commerce reports require revenue, orders, and funnel metrics, while generic conversion reports require spend, impressions, clicks, and conversions.

The results are then aggregated, and key performance ratios are calculated.

Step-by-step approach

  1. Upload the raw data report in Excel format.
  2. Make sure the report includes the minimum fields required for the system to calibrate the output.
  3. Select the goal you want the system to calculate.
  4. Based on the selected goal, the system automatically calibrates and provides the output.