Publishers have been having a tough time with display advertising and focusing on key accounts makes sense. But there is huge revenue potential in the small and medium sized businesses that publishers serviced in print as a matter of course and the introduction of AI and new KPIs can revitalise the SMB opportunity.
This is the latest in our Media Briefs series of short, sharp sponsored episodes – just 10 to 15 minutes – with a senior executive from a vendor working with publishers to make their businesses better.
In this episode, Peter speaks with Christian Scherbel, CEO of Smartico about what opportunities there are for publishers to service small-business accounts online, and restore local digital display advertising revenues.
Here are some episode highlights:
The opportunity in long-tail advertisers
I founded…a B2B news service about aviation safety. I did that for over 8 years, and afterwards built software-as-a-service for different newspaper publishers. During that time, I learned that there is huge untouched potential when it comes to advertisers. That’s usually the longtail, because it’s just too much work to work the longtail; you’d rather do the big key accounts. those big deals.
I always thought, how can we help, with technology, getting those smallest advertisers into the books of publishers online as much as most of the publishers already do in print? Why does it work in print, and not yet online? That was the starting point.
We learned two things. Digital was harder and more complex to sell for the publishers, and also more complex and new for the advertisers to buy. It meant, compared to the print sales process, it just took longer. It was often not worth it, because compared to print, the small advertisers then had even smaller budgets than they were doing in print…
Now what we see is if we can bring the small advertisers on with a very simple product that just works, and is not a lot of work – especially for the sales teams – we have a chance to increase those low CPMs from programmatic. Our idea is, how can we keep the big key account campaigns, perhaps have a few programmatic campaigns at the end, but in the middle, we can get very good CPMs from the small advertisers if we have a simple sales model.
This Media Briefs episode is sponsored by Smartico, enabling more than 500 publishers worldwide to access the untapped revenue potential in digital display advertising for small and medium sized businesses.
Combining the power of AI with human creativity, Smartico’s Smart Ads Solution builds high-impact ads from existing advertiser content. Using just a URL, print ad or social media post Smartico will create engaging ads including built-in instant landing pages for your advertisers.
Learn more about how Smartico can help grow SMB advertising revenues on their website or email Christian to request a free demo.
