SMI was established in Australia in 2009 by two female powerhouses—a leading financial journalist and a serial entrepreneur—who noticed that media buying companies were having a hard time structuring and aggregating data. Hazy estimates were resulting in wide margins of error and inaccurate reporting.
Leveraging contacts within the industry, Sue Fennessy and Jane Schulze were able to forge unprecedented relationships with Australia’s largest agency holding companies. By obtaining raw advertising invoice data from those companies, then sorting that data so it made sense, SMI was able to offer the first and only truly accurate view into the Australian advertising market.
In light of the model’s immense success in Australia, the global offices of these holding groups quickly moved to contract SMI to undertake this same service for them internationally. In 2011, SMI moved their headquarters to New York to build this global offering from the epicenter of the advertising, media and finance world.
Today, SMI has 90% of actual ad spend data in Australia, 99% in New Zealand, 70% in the United States and Great Britain. Trust and accuracy are the tenets that our business model is built on, and it’s been the key to our success with agency partners, media owners, brands and the finance industry.