Smaato, a global omnichannel advertising platform, with unparalleled reach across devices and through a plethora of ad formats, today uncovers the hottest details about the collaboration with SmartyAds. Matthew Deets, Smaato’s general manager answered our questions and provided us with insights regarding how our joined efforts will make monetization and advertising simpler.

  • Currently Smaato has over 3.8 trillion ad requests across all devices, and 1.3 billion unique users monthly. This is amazing! What makes Smaato unique for publisher monetization?

We like to think that we have the right and best omnichannel platform to give publishers unparalleled control over their monetization strategy. We help publishers create their own walled gardens, with increased flexibility. Our market and traffic quality teams work hard to ensure a clean, protected marketplace, and we help connect premium publishers with advertisers who want to reach audiences all over the globe. We also offer unified competition and a variety of auction types (including private exchange, preferred deals, prebid, and our own proprietary header bidding solution) outside of just the open exchange.

  • What are the most important things to pay attention to when connecting publishers?

In everything that we do, it is imperative that marketers transact with premium supply partners in our marketplace with full confidence that their campaigns will reach authentic target audiences. In order for that to happen, our standards for onboarding publishers leave no stone unturned. They have been purposely designed to offer an exceptionally clean marketplace with premium publishers and only top-quality inventory. For Smaato’s people to sleep well at night, we need to ensure our combination of brand safety, transparency, viewability, and fraud protection exceeds standards. While our platform is self-service, we also work tirelessly (and often hands-on) to ensure that our publishers have what they need to optimize their line items and boost the fill rate.

  • What ad formats and environments are you focused on? Which format is the most popular among your demand partners and why is it so?? Do you expect this trend to change in the near future?

Smaato is a completely omnichannel platform, which means we can reach audiences across devices and through a plethora of ad formats. Of course, we’re excited about OTT and CTV as they continue to grow, but our brand cut its teeth on mobile advertising, and we continue to help our customers thrive in this area through innovative ad formats. Native ads and video ads remain popular for their high click-through rates and eCPMs. As user attention shifts, ad formats need to remain both attractive to viewers and innovative to combat “banner blindness”. Native ads (including native rich media, native video, and even static) are great for offering an unobtrusive experience that can complement a users’ experience. Similarly, rewarded video ads offer an opportunity to “opt in” to an ad experience and reap a tangible reward, which helps boost brand sentiment (and also boosts those video completion rates). I think the trend to deliver ads that complement a user or viewer’s experience, particularly with contextual targeting, is here to stay.

  • What are 3 key factors you consider while onboarding a demand partner?

1. Added Value to our publishers. We focus on onboarding demand partners that bring on direct demand through their agency and advertiser connections;

2. Strategic Fit. We aim to onboard DSPs that represent relevant demand i.e. CTV or Video which are growth areas for our Marketplace;

3. Top Ad Quality. We can only work with DSPs that are able to control their campaigns and thus ensure a clean and safe marketplace for all participants.

  • What makes your partnership with SmartyAds valuable? What advantages does SmartyAds demand have for Smaato?

Smaato and SmartyAds share many values, including giving more control to partners, and a desire to reduce complexity. We make monetization simple, and they make advertising simple.

  • Smaato was established in 2005. No doubt, you’ve had many issues to solve during these years. What were the biggest challenges you faced when developing your SSP?

We are constantly growing and evolving. One of the biggest challenges has actually been that while we were able to well establish ourselves as a mobile SSP, our platform has vastly expanded over the last 16, almost 17 years. We offer monetization and advertising opportunities across all channels — mobile web, mobile in-app, desktop, OTT/CTV, and beyond — and across all ad formats, too.

  • What trends in monetization do you expect to influence the industry in the near future?

We’ve built Smaato to be "future-proof" by offering better transparency and putting user privacy top of our minds. We’re all for changes that help give users more control over their advertising experience. After all, engaged users/viewers/consumers mean better returns for our advertisers and a better experience and brand perception for our publishers. So we’re working closely to ensure continued compliance with evolving privacy regulations as well as offering contextual solutions to help brands reach audiences based on what they’re interested in, not who they are.

Looking beyond Smaato’s lens, we are housed within Verve Group, an ecosystem of supply- and demand-side technologies that we believe represents the future of our industry. We’re focused on a future without identifiers, so we want to do as much as we can to embrace different ways to monetize without the use of traditional tracking systems. For example, one of the companies we work with inside of Verve Group is Dataseat, a mobile-first DSP that doesn’t enlist identifiers. It opens up great conversations and discussions with partners throughout the publishing landscape.