LMA wants to give a big welcome to new R&D partner, Smartico. Lindsey Estes, chief of staff, LMA, sat down with Smartico Founder and CEO, Christian Scherbel to learn more about the company and how they help local media companies in Europe and the US.

Tell us a little bit about what Smartico does.

Smartico’s “Smart Ads” supports more than 500 news publishers all around the world to make more digital advertising revenue with their smaller advertisers. We developed a unique sales approach for these advertisers and deliver a full-service business model for publishers including technology, operations and sales trainings. With our distinctive blend of artificial intelligence, human touch, and hands-on sales support, specifically tailored to engage SMB advertisers for publishers, we instantly build new profit centres for news publishers of all sizes. 

How can Smartico products help local media companies with digital advertising?

Usually lots of publishers focus on key accounts in digital and fill up the rest of their inventory with low-CPM programmatic campaigns. The loyal smaller advertisers from print, as well as the many smaller advertisers that do not do print ads anymore, stay untouched because it is too much effort to address all these small (potential) customers. With Smartico’s technology & operations this volume of SMBs suddenly becomes addressable at scale and at profit through an automatic sales model like programmatic campaigns for large accounts did in the past. 

How has Smartico made a tangible impact on local media companies in Europe?

In Europe, we are working for more than 500 publishers that managed to sell – in average per title – 1,000 new digital ads (“Smart Ads”) to SMBs p.a. with Smartico. In average publishers make $100,000 p.a. of new ad revenues that are instantly profitable based on our pay-as-you-go model. Through our sales trainings for publishers and visual reportings for advertisers we made display ads for them sustainable, profitable and fun … and stopped talking about click rates but engagement & attention rates that show the quality of the newspaper audience.

What makes Smartico unique?

Smartico’s “Smart Ads” is a turn-key business model that instantly makes more money with almost no risk through our pay-as-you-go approach. We focus on an underserved target group of regional advertisers that publishers know very well, care a lot but couldn’t monetise without a very efficient technology and operations stack so far. We are the missing link between automatic sales for national clients through programmatic at low CPM and manual sales for regional key accounts at high CPM and high effort. Smartico delivers high CPM, automatic sales and scale for small clients that are at the heart of the community of the publishers, while making instant profit for the publisher.

How can media companies take advantage of what Smartico offers?

Please reach out to me via cs@smartico.one and I show you business cases, media kits and more from 100s of other publishers, and also build demo “Smart Ads” based on a few advertisers from your community to prove the ease and attractiveness of this new sales & product approach to SMB ad sales.

Want to learn more? Smartico is hosting a webinar on April 16, 2024 at 1:30 EST. Register to attend the free webinar here.