press gazette: Having helped to transform the digital display advertising offering of local, independent and B2B publishers in Germany and other parts of Europe, Smartico is now expanding to the UK.

The company will take any print advert sold to a small or medium-sized business and turn it into a professional-looking online banner ad complete with click-through landing page for the campaign.

“What we do is we take the strong existing print advertising business of a newspaper and try to find an intuitive and hassle-free way to leverage this for digital,” says CEO and founder Christian Scherbel.

Print to digital display advertising: ‘We build profit centres with media companies’
Europe’s largest publisher Axel Springer, Mediahuis (which bought Ireland’s Independent News and Media in 2019) Madsack, Dumont, and Tamedia are among its 100 existing clients.

Founded in Germany in late 2013, the company, which trades as Transmatico in Europe, makes more than €20m of new local digital advertising revenues a year for its client publishers, reaching some 20m unique users per month with more than one million local ads produced since its foundation.

Smartico runs a revenue sharing model – taking about a 30% cut of new digital ad sales – rather than a flat fee, although this option is available to those who prefer to offer discretionary discounts to clients. This model ties Smartico’s success to that of the publisher.

“We build profit centres together with media companies,” explains Scherbel. “It’s a full service of everything you need to transform your existing SMB print advertising into digital.”

He adds: “In newspapers you have a lot of local businesses that advertise and it’s super important for them to be there, it’s core to their business, they have been doing this for decades. But if you look on the news website, depending on how big the title is, you’ll see a lot of programmatic  adverts from national brands – everything is there.

“No wonder, because if you’re talking to a national brand, they have absolutely no problem understanding things like ‘eCPM’ (cost per thousand ad impressions), ‘CTR’ (click-through rate), ‘frequency capping’, ‘regional targeting’, ‘do you want to have a remarketing pixel?’.

“Tell this to a local advertiser, a restaurant owner, and they will say: ‘That does not make any sense for me. I don’t need it.’ So they need a totally different business model.”

Scherbel says there is “huge untapped potential” in digital advertising for local and specialist B2B publishers, who might sell 2,000 print ads in a year but only ten banner ads.

“Why is that? Because the offering is not intuitive enough. It’s too complex,” he says. “That’s what we try to change. For a local advertiser it has to be as simple as the print ad offer: do you want a small or a big one? End of story.”