Smaato is a digital ad tech platform and ad server. Smaato's self-serve omnichannel monetization solution gives publishers the ability to manage their entire ad stack in one place. Ad monetization technology lets publishers keep their content free for users. The company was founded in 2005 by Ragnar Kruse and Petra Vorsteher. The name Smaato comes from the Japanese word for "smart." Smaato is headquartered in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for "Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. There are additional offices in New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Singapore, and Shanghai, with over 190 employees from more than 40 different countries.

History

Founded in 2005, Smaato launched its mobile

supply-side platform A supply-side platform (SSP) or sell-side platform is a technology platform to enable web publishers and digital out-of-home (DOOH) media owners to manage their advertising inventory, fill it with ads, and receive revenue. Many of the larger web ...

(SSP) a year after the company was formed. In 2012, Smaato launched its

real-time bidding Real-time bidding (RTB) is a means by which advertising inventory is bought and sold on a per-impression basis, via instantaneous programmatic auction An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them u ...

ad exchange An ad exchange is a technology platform that facilitates the buying and selling of media advertising inventory from multiple ad networks. Prices for the inventory are determined through real-time bidding (RTB). The approach is technology-driven a ...

. After, the company focused on mobile acquisition and building out the self-service side of its automation platform. In 2015, the company released a full-featured publisher ad server, the Smaato Publisher Platform (SPX). The platform enables app developers and digital publishers to immediately monetize their properties by delivering target consumers to advertisers, based on real-time data. The following year, Smaato was selected by Google and integrated into the AdMob and DoubleClick for Publishers platforms via SDK-less mediation. Later in 2016, Smaato further developed its products for the demand side of

mobile advertising Mobile advertising is a form of advertising via mobile (wireless) phones or other mobile devices. It is a subset of mobile marketing, mobile advertising can take place as text ads via SMS, or banner advertisements that appear embedded in a m ...

. The Smaato Demand Platform (SDX) offered demand partners greater flexibility and control over their mobile ad traffic. Smaato was sold to Beijing-based Spearhead Integrated Marketing Communication Group for $148 Million in 2016. In 2018, the company integrated with Amazon Publisher Services (APS) to provide in-app demand partners access to Amazon's Transparent Ad Marketplace inventory. Smaato presently focuses on deploying

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

. In May 2018, their Automated Traffic Curation (ATC) product was reported to significantly reduce costs of programmatic bidding for

demand-side platform A demand-side platform (DSP) is a system that allows buyers of digital advertising inventory to manage multiple ad exchange and data exchange accounts through one interface. Real-time bidding for displaying online advertising takes place within the ...

s (DSPs). The machine learning technology filters out less relevant inventory before sending a bid request to a demand partner's platform — providing better opportunities for advertisers by saving time and expenses related to data processing. The majority of Smaato's revenues currently come from the US, but the company expects a significant increase in the Chinese market in the coming years. In 2021 the company launched OTT solution inside its Smaato Publisher Platform (SPX) and does Server-Side Ad Insertion in house. In July 2021, Smaato was acquired by Media and Games Invest. Together with Verve Group, Smaato completes the tech stack with omnichannel offerings across web, in-app, DOOH, and CTV.{{Cite web, url=https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2021/08/26/media-marketing-commerce-investment-series-part-2-ma, title=Media, Marketing & Commerce Investment Series, date=2021-08-26, website=exchangewire, language=en-US, access-date=2021-12-07

References

Companies based in San Francisco 2005 establishments in California Online advertising services and affiliate networks

History

See also

References