Electromidia () is used to big numbers. It earned more than R$1 billion last year and exceeded R$900 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2024. In Brazil, the company is a leader in media out of home (OOH) – that advertising that appears on the big screen at the bus stop, on the subway platform or in the common areas of a condominium. And, as a rule, Eletromidia’s customers also make billions. But there is another side of the business, less known, which started with a non-standard demand, from a lady who approached the company: advertising, on a screen installed in the elevator of her building, an apartment that was for sale in that same building.
It didn’t even take two days for the company’s first “individual” client to close a deal. This is how Eletromidia confirmed that it could open one. And it put the company’s more than 50,000 digital panels at the service of the corner bakery, the neighborhood beauty salon – or even other ladies with property to sell.
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Fishing for sardines?
At first glance, it may seem that the company has added sardines to its portfolio of large customers. However, by serving small and medium-sized companies (SMEs), Eletromidia entered a segment that, last year, grew more than twice as much as the Brazilian Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to Sebrae. According to the data that Eletromidia takes as a basis, it is a market that generates R$20 billion a year.
Customers with this profile have limited access to out of homewhether due to the availability of resources or simply the lack of a marketing area within a smaller business. Eletromidia was not the only one to notice this bottleneck and try to fill it. Competitor JCDecaux, a French multinational media company in public places, has, since 2021, an advertising platform for small business owners. Others players Minors are also in the running.
“The big challenge is to have an efficient initiative and have inventory volume [número de painéis] to be able to be close to as many customers as possible”, said Lucio Schneider, director of marketing and growth areas at Eletromidia, to InfoMoney. He states that, despite the competition, the company leads the movement to bring small businesses to the out of home. “In everyday conversations, we have companies interested in getting closer to us and even bringing their inventories”, he reveals.
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Structured platform
Selling media to SMEs was Elemidia’s practice before the 2020 merger, which gave rise to Eletromídia as it is today. But it has been less than a year since the company has been working with its own structure to serve this type of client: Eletromidia Aqui. The platform works as a kind of e-commerce that operates with a model self-service. Small and medium-sized entrepreneurs can choose, independently, which panels they want to advertise on.
Geolocation is a key point in this process – for a neighborhood business, for example, it is more advantageous to choose to appear on screens that are in the neighborhood. At Eletromidia Aqui, it is possible to buy media from R$99. The amount paid will depend on the number of panels selected, the location of the screen, whether the client will arrive with a ready-made advertisement or create it within the platform itself – which There’s even an artificial intelligence tool to do this job. The investment, which starts at less than three digits, can reach R$50,000 and campaigns can last six months.
Between January and September 2024, Eletromidia earned R$11 million from the platform and had more than five thousand customers. At first glance, these are practically insignificant numbers compared to the billion-dollar figures that the company boasts. But the media segment for SMEs is seen as crucial to the company’s future expansion.
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“It is a front in which we are investing a lot”, says Schneider, without revealing numbers. He explains that, even though it was designed for small and medium-sized companies, the platform also has the potential to benefit large companies, with the possibility of media for resellers and franchisees.
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