Code3 wins awards for AI-led commerce work driving revenue growth

Code3 turned a pair of industry honors into a sharp argument about where agency growth is headed. The digital marketing agency won Skai’s Celeste AI Pioneer (Agency) award in the 2026 US ShopAble Media Awards and picked up another major recognition from The Drum Awards for Marketing for work that linked artificial intelligence, commerce, and performance marketing into one client story.

The clearest proof point came from Elida Beauty. Code3 said its creative work for POND’S, Noxzema, and Caress drove 17.7 times more attributed revenue and 10 times more views on Amazon. That kind of result matters because it gives the agency something sturdier than a media metric or a vanity impression count. It is a revenue story, and for brands spending heavily in retail media, that is the metric that opens doors.

Skai announced the 2026 US ShopAble Media Awards on May 13, 2026, and said Code3 won for using its purpose-built GenAI agent across forecasting, new-to-brand analysis, reporting, and optimization on Amazon Ads. Skai framed the competition around results-driven use of its platform in the age of agentic AI, rewarding agencies that could move faster on data and coordinate across more channels. A Skai case study went further, saying Code3 identified $839,000 in incremental revenue and cut reporting time in half after using Celeste AI to handle the grind of manual forecasting and fragmented reporting.

That operational angle is the real story here. Code3 is not pitching itself as a narrow SEO shop or a pure media buyer. It describes itself as an independent digital marketing agency uniting commerce, media, and creative to drive full-funnel growth, with headquarters in Cleveland and backing from Graham Holdings Company. Founded in 2010, the agency is using the awards to validate an integrated model that ties consumer insight, creative execution, and measurement to commercial outcomes.

The brand context matters too. POND’S dates to 1846 and bills itself as the world’s first skincare brand, while Elida Beauty says Noxzema has more than 100 years of trust and that it is remixing classic beauty brands for a new generation. That is exactly the kind of portfolio where Amazon becomes both shelf and search engine, and where creative has to do the work of discovery as well as conversion.

The Drum Awards for Marketing sits inside The Drum’s global awards program and recognizes campaigns, companies, and people across marketing and advertising. Put together, the two honors point to a simple benchmark for agencies chasing new business in 2026: AI alone is not the pitch. The pitch is AI connected to commerce, creative, and measurement, with revenue to prove it.