by Kristy Martino | Feb 12, 2025 | Uncategorized
Where to start? How about we reject the notion that we either need to be for or against the use of artificial intelligence (AI). There are countless think pieces out there already—and most feel compelled to take a firm stance. Here at Strategic Media, from our perspective, the stance to take is not one marked by hysteria or worship, but by diligence. We need to take the long view on this.
One of the more pervasive myths on humanity, likely dating back to the dawn of advertising during the Industrial Revolution, is that we are limited, inefficient, and prone to disobedience. This, of course, is true. However, in many instances, these qualities are either overexaggerated or they can become advantages. Swap out the word disobedience with disruption and you’ve got every VC backed tech startup’s mission statement.
And then there is creativity. The super power that is always taken for granted. And on cue, the robots arrived. Now marketers, CEOs, and life coaches label the human creative process as “painfully slow.” Not only slow, but painfully so!
Looking back on our 25 years in business, we can see that this is simply not true. Perhaps we’ve been lucky with our particular team (many of them have been here for well over a decade) but we have ample evidence of the swiftness, dedication, and tenacity that has resulted in profits and respect from our clients.
If you are working with creatives who are professional and experienced, you can move fast and produce higher quality content that connects authentically to users and customers.
Experience, as in the kind of know-how that comes from a mix of backgrounds, education, and gained insights is not entirely teachable to AI (yet). For example: our Creative Team not only has a combined experience of over 40 years in advertising but also brings with them dense knowledge of seemingly random topics, like grief and obscure billiards rules. All of which enhances curiosity and instinct; key ingredients in the creative process.
Creatives naturally have a deep understanding of the human experience—which is invaluable when it comes to understanding audience motivation.
And let’s not forget: that audience isn’t AI, so the creative process cannot be directed or dictated by it. The closer we can come to nailing the experiences and emotions of our audience, the better our conversion rates and returns will be. That’s the very simple equation underlying advertising since the ancient Egyptians started plastering posters on their walls.
AI will continue to evolve and improve, providing us with opportunities to streamline, cure diseases, and idealistically, prevent war. But when it comes to creativity, our flaws, our hopes, the precise fibers of who we are will always be the best fodder for creativity.
This is not David (humans) vs. Goliath (AI). AI is the slingshot, a tool to defeat a great enemy, which could be a number of things: pressure to create content at a breakneck speed, improve efficiency, and eliminate mistakes, etc.
Here at SMI, our goal is to grow the businesses of our clients by writing and producing compelling ads that motivate listeners to buy what you’re selling—and for that, we are armed and ready.
Are you!? Let us turn your marketing budget into profit. Contact us today!
by Kristy Martino | Jan 29, 2025 | Uncategorized
While the Super Bowl has long been regarded as the pinnacle of advertising opportunities, we’ve got a better bet for you: audio advertising. Here are 5 reasons why audio advertising is more efficient than those monumental Super Bowl ads.
1. Cost-Effectiveness
One of the most significant advantages of audio advertising is its cost efficiency. Marketers can achieve substantial reach without breaking the bank. For example, on average, a successful mature audio campaign can sustain anywhere between $500,000 to $2 million dollars per month, allowing advertisers to reach half of the coveted 25-54 demographic. This is comparable to the impact of a single 30-second Super Bowl ad, which for the 2025 Super Bowl costs $7 million for the airtime alone. This means that for a fraction of the cost of a Super Bowl ad, brands can achieve similar impressions across a broader audience over an extended period—all with a high-converting frequency that a one-time event simply cannot compete with.
2. Targeted Reach
Audio advertising offers a level of targeting that Super Bowl ads simply can’t match. Legacy AM/FM formats can be geographically or demographically targeted to minimize any waste in spend. Programmatic advertising through platforms like Amazon, Spotify, Pandora, and various podcast networks, can be even more precise with targeting based on listening behavior, personal interests. Because the content is tailored to resonate with listeners’ preferences, this focused approach is far superior in terms of engagement and return on ad spend.
3. Flexibility and Agility
In today’s fast-paced market, flexibility is essential. Audio campaigns allow for rapid content updates and adjustments based on performance analytics. With production costs fairly low to produce high quality audio ads, marketers can refine ad messaging, timing, and platforms swiftly, responding to audience engagement in real-time. In contrast, Super Bowl ads require a long lead time, with significant resources devoted to production, making it nearly impossible to pivot based on immediate feedback.
4. Enhanced Engagement
Studies have shown that audio advertising fosters deeper connections with audiences. Unlike traditional visual ads that consumers might skip or ignore, audio ads require active listening. The limits of this medium are beneficial. Strategic and engaging messaging combined with thoughtful sound design allows brands to craft stories and create emotional connections, leading to enhanced brand recall and customer loyalty. A Super Bowl ad may be the hot topic at the office Monday morning, but listeners can retain a good audio ad well beyond a day or even a typical news cycle.
5. Accessibility and Convenience
Finally, audio ads are just inherently more accessible. We listen to the radio, stream music, or queue up our favorite podcast in the car, in the gym, and while we’re cooking. Often through earbuds or headphones. Consumers are simply able to access audio content in more places than ever before. Brands can now seamlessly embed their messages within users’ daily routines—and if those messages are relevant and memorable, they are perceived as less of an intrusion and more like added content.
Audio is the Better Bet
While Super Bowl ads hold undeniable prestige, audio advertising provides an efficient, targeted, and engaging alternative that allows brands to maximize their budgets and connect with audiences on a deeper level.
The cost savings, targeted reach, flexibility, engagement, and convenience make audio advertising a powerful contender against the traditional appeal of Super Bowl ads. Audio may seem like the underdog of the advertising world, but brands would be wise to consider investing more into this innovative medium and capture their audience’s attention more effectively.
by Kristy Martino | Nov 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
Make Sure they are Listening
We’re all familiar with the old adage, the customer is always right, but what does it mean if we truly believe our clients are always right? Working under such an assumption could potentially remove opportunities for curiosity, for questions, for innovation.
At SMI, we’ve made a slight revision to that classic salesman’s axiom that we believe produces the results: The customer should always be heard.
From the very first point of contact, we begin listening—really listening—to how you describe your brand, your product, your customers, your goals, and more. Throughout our process, from onboarding calls to creative reviews, to strategic planning, we are listening with the kind of curiosity that leads to good questions that ultimately lead to performance. That is the shared goal that we are all after.
Creating time and space for our clients to educate us on their brand and expertise is imperative in crafting a tactical gameplan, one without the blindspots created by false assumptions.
We don’t assume. We listen first and then we act.
In order to succeed in our shared goal, we also need to discover (and then manage) the expectations of our clients. Most expectations are reasonable, thoughtful, and essential to a prosperous relationship between client and agency. We work hard to clearly define key milestones within a campaign, meet deadlines, and overdeliver. We want our clients to expect greatness from us because that is what our seasoned and dedicated team is capable of.
Of course, we’ve all been on the other side of the table from a not-so-reasonable expectation. These should not be ignored or acquiesced to. Not-so-reasonable expectations can be illuminating afterall. They just need to be managed. (Psst: listening plays a helpful role in these conversations as well!)
Managing expectations is a skill we employ over all parts of our business, but here’s an example relative to the ever skyrocketing potential of podcasts:
Marketers often want to get their products on the most popular, well-known shows—and rightly so. Big shows have a really big reach. But the reality is that, even though we’d love to get all of our clients on high performing shows like The Joe Rogan Experience, the #1 podcast in the world, sometimes the budget, availability, or target audience just isn’t viable at the moment. However, with our team’s strategic creativity and careful listening this becomes a solvable problem.
As Podcast Operations and Buyer, Steve Mondor said, “understanding the client’s budget and listening to their needs is crucial. SMI knows from experience that you can test into a sizable amount of smaller shows in order to gain valuable learning that will allow long term growth.”
In general, we know that making choices based on personal biases or anecdotal evidence rarely hits the bullseye. It’s our job to listen carefully and ask why you want to make a certain decision. It’s also our job to carefully guide you toward the effective solution. In making sure our clients are heard, we open up the door for more creative and effective solutions, ones that will more resourcefully meet their goals.
Here at SMI, we take pride in our collective knowledge. We are pioneering new technology to change the ad business. We are experts in what we do.
But that is just one part of the equation.
Our business relationships require reciprocity. Meaning, we expect you to rely on our expertise just as much as we rely on yours. You are the expert of your brand, your product, your story. We may not utilize buyer personas, SWOT analysis, or pitch decks in our ads directly, but those insights that you provide us with are invaluable. We leverage your expertise.
This reciprocity allows us to move swiftly, remain nimble, and hit our target.
But how does it actually work in real life? You point out the problems, and we fill in the solutions.
You lean on us for our expertise as we lean on yours. It’s that simple.
Amidst the hustle and bustle of marketing dollars, charts, graphs, and channel acronyms—it can be easy to lose sight of a very fundamental truth: we are human beings working together. The working relationships (and frankly, the social offshoot as well) we have with our clients are paramount.
In order to raise important questions and concerns, it is vital that we understand and value one another’s perspective and expertise. It’s what makes it a relationship more than a transaction. Being human is what makes us resilient, adaptable, and truly creative in our problem solving. It’s what makes the team at SMI a worthy partner in your business.
by Jeremy Glass | Aug 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
Jeff Small never could have imagined at the time how his passion for swimming would inspire the development of a revolutionary media operating system, but good ideas take time to percolate.
Strategic Media was founded in the spring of 2000, offering clients like ZipRecruiter, Babbel, and VistaPrint, a direct response audio advertising model based on transparency and communication. The company cultivated a positive reputation for its ability to provide a precise look at how a brand’s ad spend changes from week to week.
Powered by a once-cutting edge, now outdated system named Wisdom SMI set itself apart from competitors with its rapport with clients and media management system.
As SMI led the charge embracing burgeoning audio formats like podcast and streaming, Wisdom simply couldn’t keep up.
Two-and-half decades later, Jeff would flip the proverbial lever on Stanley – Strategic Media’s proprietary operating system – beginning a new era for the company. Consolidating the processes of media buying, media management, creative management, analytics, and accounting into one system: Stanley.
Since its launch, Stanley has streamlined client workflows and internal operations, allowing the company to deliver a better product to clients.
Years in the making, the path to Stanley began with the hot spark of necessity and went through hundreds of hours of development before its launch earlier this year. This is the story of how Stanley came to be.
Building Stanley
Ben Siegel had been at SMI for more than half a decade before overseeing both the development and implementation of Stanley.”
“Wisdom just wasn’t working,” starts Ben, “and it got to the point where we couldn’t add any more data points with it getting slower and slower.”
While the idea for a new system had been around for years, Ben and his team officially started development on Stanley in September 2022.
For two years, Stanley was slowly pieced together, painstakingly tested, and re-tested to ensure everything worked. The process was long, tedious, and wrought with setbacks. One step forward would inevitably lead to a large leap back. Nearly every department spent time with Stanley, poring over every bug, feature, and potential pain point.
“Everybody thought I was crazy for flipping the switch.”
“The process is a tedious one,” adds Jeff, reflecting on the difficult task of building an operating system from the ground up. “It’s challenging… frustrating for the people building it and frustrating for those waiting for it to be built. I don’t think there’s much you can do to prepare people for those challenges ahead of time.”
Where most agencies typically rely on a combination of software and platforms to manage their products, Stanley provides stations, vendors, publishers, and internal teams at SMI with a one-stop shop for everything.
In 2024, SMI quietly switched systems from Wisdom to Stanley, kicking off a new era for the company. Jeff describes the atmosphere:
“Everybody thought I was crazy for flipping the switch,” laughs Jeff. “They probably still think I’m crazy, but we would not be done today had that switch not been flipped back then.”
The improvements were felt almost immediately.
“Lightning fast,” says Senior Media Buyer, Pam Wolgram. “Absolutely lightning fast.” Pam and her team spent countless hours on Wisdom, working on multiple computers to process information.
“We would select our stations and create our buys and then import those sheets into the system. When we’re working with 1500 to 2000 stations a week across all of our campaigns…it would take hours to send out insertion orders.” But with Stanley—seconds.
Alongside the time-saving element, Pam points out the long-term benefits of working with a streamlined system.
“With Stanley, vendors can go into their account and see everything they’ve been sent. They can either accept or decline—and if they’re declining it, they can tell us why.” This ease in communication allows Pam or someone on the Media team to negotiate the rate or align over future inventory.
“Really, that’s the piece that’s been missing for a long time,” adds Pam, “because we’re working with such a large number of stations and didn’t have an effective way for that communication to happen with Wisdom.”
Stanley has become a cornerstone of SMI’s operations, improving efficiency, reducing manual workloads, and empowering publishers with easy-to-access data. By all accounts, Stanley has transformed business at SMI.
Why Stanley?
As a student at the University of Maine, Jeff gravitated towards the school’s competitive swim team as a means to train his body while keeping his mind sharp.
“On any given day, I would probably spend four to six hours in the Stanley M. Wallace pool,” continues Jeff, “and when you’re spending that much time under the water, you can’t help but be in your head.”
The rigorous training schedule rooted a strong sense of determination into the then-teenager’s head that proved to last far beyond his college years.
“Stanley became a name synonymous with determination.”
The pool’s location, directly underneath a sign reading ‘Stanley M. Wallace Pool’ inadvertently planted the seed associating the name Stanley with success.
“With every other stroke, I’d lift my head out of the water to breathe and see that name up on the wall. Stanley became a name synonymous with determination.”
Jeff can’t help but marvel at the changes Stanley has brought about from within, and outside, the company. Because Stanley was devised and built within the walls of Strategic Media, clients are offered a bespoke experience they cannot receive with other agencies.
“Our teams and clients are working with a system that is, operationally, much smoother than before. Because it takes less time for data entry, their time is free to focus on negotiations, strategizing, and analysis. I’m pretty damn happy with Stanley right now.”
With Stanley now at the heart of Strategic Media’s operations, the company has seen remarkable improvements in efficiency and productivity. By drastically reducing the time required for tasks and empowering clients with easily accessible data, Stanley has transformed the way SMI does business. Another perk of working on an in-house system instead of leasing one externally? Money saved and re-invested in talent.
Strategic Media maintains that efficiency and improvement are always within arm’s reach. Stanley empowers employees to further refine their skills and talents, creating a culture of expertise. As SMI moves forward, Jeff remains optimistic about the potential for Stanley’s future developments, knowing that innovation is a continuous journey.
The operating system’s namesake, the Stanley M. Wallace pool, reminds Jeff of his determination and perseverance. Just as he pushed through swim practice, he—along with the rest of the Stanley team—led the charge in developing a system that could change the way ad agencies do business.
Learn how Strategic Media Inc. can elevate your brand’s voice with a direct-response audio advertising campaign managed by Stanley.
by Jeremy Glass | Jun 17, 2024 | Uncategorized
As podcasting continues its upward trajectory, agencies are leveraging the channel’s high user impact with programmatic audio ads that significantly capture users’ attention and motivate them to act.
Designed for placement in such categories as podcasts, digital radio, and music-streaming services, programmatic advertising garners success through its ability to precisely target audiences based on their listening habits, preferences, and demographics.
Utilizing advanced algorithms to analyze user data, such as demographics, location, and listening habits, advertisers can avoid wasting resources on audiences unlikely to engage with their content.
Programmatic advertising also empowers SMI’s Data & Analytics Teams to optimize and refine campaigns, while using data points to cut through the static and deliver ads that motivate listeners to act.
If you’re not utilizing programmatic, you’re missing out on the big picture.
A Rising Format
Did you know that programmatic comprised 11% of podcast revenue in 2023?
The emergence of podcasting in the early 2000s catapulted programmatic audio advertising to a gold standard practice. Paired with traditional media placement within terrestrial radio, SMI Media Director Heather Hansen, explains the benefits of programmatic.
“In podcasting you can target by genres,” starts Heather, “Genres are associated with specific demographics – for example, a family and kids genre targets women who have children. With programmatic, there’s a way to take it even further. When working with a female-focused product like Uqora. We’re able to go to our programmatic DSP and find women between the ages of 25 and 64, who are interested in health and run ads that speak to this segment.”
Once this segment is identified, the media team works with creative to craft an ad that speaks directly to the target audience.
There is also a contextual element that points to key words or phrases within the content of the podcast to target listeners on a more granular level. For example, a stock-trading app will likely see a high ROI when placed within a podcast series focused on investing.
The Habits of Highly-Entertained Listeners
A format that’s long outgrown its infancy stage, the podcast industry has grown dramatically over the past decade with an estimated listenership of just under 505 million. This year, podcasts accounted for 11% of all daily audio, with nearly a quarter of listeners spending ten hours or more listening each week.
A recent study conducted by Neuro-Insight found that, when placed in personalized playlists, long term recall scored 49% better than radio. Portability plays a huge role in those numbers; whether you’re listening to your favorite podcast in your car, at work, on the phone, or with a smartwatch, the ability to listen anytime, anywhere, without interruption elicits a strong brand recall.
In 2023, Nielsen measured how emerging channels such as podcasts influenced user spending and found a 38.7% bump in brand recall with an increase in baseline brand awareness in close second with a 37.5% increase. With podcasting sales projected to reach nearly $2.6 billion by 2026, millions more will continue, not only listening, but listening with intent to act.
Minimizing Waste
Programmatic audio advertising revolutionizes marketing strategies by offering precise targeting and real-time optimization, consequently minimizing excess waste. This technology allows advertisers to reach their target audience efficiently, ensuring that every dollar spent contributes to meaningful engagement and conversions.
Advertisers bid for ad space based on the value they attribute to reaching their target audience at a given moment, ensuring that they don’t overspend on placements that may not yield optimal results. Real-time bidding (RTB) systems ensure advertisers pay competitive prices for ad placements.
Programmatic provides thorough analytics and reporting tools, enabling advertisers to monitor their campaign performance instantly. Through tracking essential metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions, advertisers can promptly pinpoint any ads that aren’t meeting expectations and adapt their strategies as needed, maximizing their investment’s effectiveness.
Additionally, marketers have the ability to manage time-sensitive ads directly, bypassing the need to coordinate with publishers.
SMI was founded on the principle of helping brands reach greater profits with measurable radio advertising. As the audio landscape continues to evolve, investing time and resources into emerging platforms allows us to reach audiences on a level that’s only set to grow.
See the power of programmatic first hand with audio ads that speak to listeners and boost your brand’s voice. Reach out to us today!
