S4M | M&M Global

S4M

S4M is a mobile-native ad tech company providing a global premium programmatic platform for advertisers and brands.

S4M

Business name: S4M

URL: www.s4m.io

Twitter: @S4Mobile

Sector: Mobile Programmatic Advertising

Based in: Headquartered in Paris

Regions covered: 

Offices in New York, London, Düsseldorf, Sao Paulo, and Singapore.

Founders:

– Christophe Collet – www.linkedin.com/in/ccollet

– Guillaume Marcilhac – https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumemarcilhac

What do each of you do?

Christophe Collet is the CEO of S4M and Guillaume Marcilhac is the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) of S4M.

Who are your major backers? 

We received our Series A Funding from Entrepreneur Venture and Bpifrance.

What’s the track record? 

Bpifrance finance businesses from the seed phase to IPO listing, through loans, guarantees, and equity. Each year, Bpifrance allocates around €21.7 billion to business. Their goal is bridge the public sector with entrepreneurs and bring French business abroad, Entrepreneur Venture has been financing and guiding SME for the past 15 years. A few notable organisations funded by Entrepreneur Venture include Traveldoo, eNovance, and Maxicoffee.

Since 2011 S4M has had continuous growth and international expansion with active offices now in Singapore, UK, US, Brazil, and Germany in addition to the French headquarters. We have a growing client base of more than 250 advertisers around the world and a return business rate of 98%. In 2015 after fundraising €6 million in Series A, we doubled our staff in 6 months and our revenue has increased by  seven times since 2012.

What do they say? 

S4M was founded in 2011. In June 2015, we raised €6 million in Series A funding. Since then, we doubled our staff in 6 months and have accelerated our international expansion with offices in 5 regions globally. We are an innovative ad-technology startup transforming mobile ads into genuine personalised content for each individual user. We developed a mobile-native technology platform with programmatic expertise and transparent campaign management from ad impressions to conversions in both mobile browsers and applications. Our technology is MRC accredited for mobile metrics and we are currently the only platform with certified post-click mobile metrics.

What does this mean? 

In layman’s terms we are an end-to-end mobile advertising platform that creative, delivers, tracks, optimise and analyses mobile campaigns. Our technology can track the entire mobile consumer journey and optimise the campaign results in real-time. For advertisers it means having a mobile specific advertising strategy to engage with their potential and existing consumers. Furthermore, mobile programmatic advertising allows advertisers to target and retarget individuals with personalised creative and scenarios.

What makes your company different from its competitors? 

Our company is the only platform that has received accreditations from the Media Rating Council (MRC) on mobile post-ad metrics. Advertisers and media agencies will be able to manage their mobile campaigns from impressions to conversions all in one platform. Unlike other ad tech technologies, we are a mobile-native solution, meaning a solution tailored for mobile devices and not adapted from previous desktop technologies. Finally, S4M clients have full ownership of their campaign data, which is not the case with most existing technology platforms in the market today.

Who are your clients?

Our clients are advertisers and media agencies. We currently serve more than 250 advertisers internationally and deliver more than 1250 campaigns each year. Our media agency client portfolio includes: Dentsu Aegis Network, GroupM, Havas, OMD, Starcom, and Carat.

Our brand advertisers include: Renault, McDonald’s, Cartier, Subway, Levis, Adidas, Lexus, and Pernod Ricard.

How will your company change the world?

Through our premium programmatic technology, we want to be able to redefine mobile advertising by gaining advertiser confidence and user acceptance. To achieve this, we make it possible to hyper contextualise and personalised advertising on the most intimate everyday devices – smartphones. Mobile advertising will no longer be intrusive and unwanted, instead it is thoughtfully and strategically delivered that provides added-value for users in the form of on-demand content and services.

Who do you compete with?

We compete for similar clients with other ad tech technologies in the market such as Sizmek, Criteo, Tapad, and InMobi.

Who should be worried?

Existing technologies without third-party accreditations should be worried about their place in the industry. As the mobile ad tech industry matures, the industry will start to raise its standards and weed out players that have not been audited against third-party industry standards. Also, desktop technologies that have been adopted for mobile campaigns will be challenged by mobile-native technologies such as S4M. A platform made specifically for mobile is more transparent.

If you could choose any investor globally who would it be? 

We would choose investment firms focusing on ad tech and innovative technologies such as Tiger Global Management based in New York, also since has worked with very successful technology players in the industry. Ideally, we would like to work with investors in the US as we are starting to expand into this market.

If you could poach any member of staff from any company in the world who would it be?

As a startup based in France, if we could poach talent, we would aim for all the data scientists and developers in the Silicone Valley. Technology and product is at the heart of what we do so one of our biggest challenges is the attract and retain the most talented developers.

 

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