By 2021 content marketing, as an industry, will exceed $400B and one of the companies fueling this tremendous growth is Smartology. The company’s platform serves as the connector for global brands to establish thought leadership through the audience of media powerhouses like WSJ, Economist, and Bloomberg. Leveraging a combination of machine learning and natural language processing, Smartology effectively serves branded content to the right reader, at the right time yielding impressive engagement and click-through rates, at scale. In addition to already working with an impressive roster of publishers, the company, which was founded in 2010, has executived campaigns for some of the largest, most-recognizable brands.
London TechWatch interviewed COO Gary Neal about the experience of creating the ultimate distribution channel for global brands, Smartology’s future plans, and the company’s recent fundraise.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Series A funding – £2.8M from Committed Capital.
Tell us about the product or service Smartology offers.
Focusing on the rapid growth in content marketing, Smartology provides a key distribution channel for global brands to disseminate their content and thought leadership across premium media owner sites according to relevancy. Headquartered in London with a presence in the US and Asia, Smartology has run campaigns for over 120 of the world’s largest brands across global premium media owners including FT.com, Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Reuters, The Economist, Bloomberg, BBC and many more.
Smartology’s content distribution solution uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing to semantically profile client’s branded content and dynamically serve these in ad units alongside relevant premium media owners’ articles. This has resulted in record engagement and click through rates for campaigns.
What inspired you to start Smartology?
I wanted to revolutionise advertising and use technology to make Ads contextually relevant for users, thus increasing engagement while giving brands the very best service.
How is Smartology different?
We are unique as a contextual DSP – this means we only buy contextually relevant inventory on Ad Exchanges, minimising budget wastage for brands – as they only pay for Ads which appear next to relevant articles.
What market is Smartology targeting and how big is it?
Content marketing will be worth over $400B by 2021.
What are some digital advertising trends that will be popular in 2019?
Publishers will rationalise their tech partners, the use of Machine Learning and AI will continue to increase, and the comeback of context continues.
What’s your business model?
We take a flat percent fee of the media budget, this includes all the work we do on designing creatives, buying inventory and managing campaigns for our clients.
We take a flat percent fee of the media budget, this includes all the work we do on designing creatives, buying inventory and managing campaigns for our clients.
What was the funding process like?
It took a long time (circa 9 months) and due diligence took up a lot of resource, but we learned many lessons along the way.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Investing in Adtech companies has reduced, so it was a challenge to show that we are different from the crowd.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
The fact that we are disrupting the traditional programmatic advertising model and achieved great results as well as having relationships with very premium publishers (such as the FT, Economist, WSJ, NY Times, Bloomberg) and the largest brands in world, including HSBC, Deloitte, PWC, AB Global, and Blackrock.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Establishing our commercial teams in the US and ramping up the technical team here in London to deliver a full roadmap.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh
injection of capital in the bank?
Double down on your lean approach, use free applications, cut costs where possible.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
US expansion, but also exploring opportunities in other region and other languages.
What is your favorite London pub to grab a pint with the team?
Mc and Sons – 160 Unions Street.
