The Story of Local

Back in 2006, it was a rainy day and Alon, Nir, and I were at a small coffee shop. On a napkin we wrote, “No matter what size of a business, no matter where in the world, and no matter what this business does for a living, we want Skai to help this business scale and grow using the Internet.”

From there we set out to capture the intent of consumers and align it with the offering of brands. To make it to the point of being “the only leader” in the industry was/is humbling!

It was 2010 that we felt like something was missing when looking in the mirror. We were not helping the SMBs and Multi-Location businesses grow the best we could. We felt bad about having a vision that we were not fully acting upon.

We decided to hold ourselves accountable and invested a couple million USD building Skai Local. We took on the challenge of having a highly scalable system to allow mass management across Locations and/or SMBs. And this became a key agenda across Skai.

3 years later, Skai Local is seeing huge lift and great returns for our clients. From large brands building programs to tap the local potential to pure-play SMB agencies and Directories needing a powerful automated system, Skai Local helps unveil this untapped dimension of the inte[r]n[e]t.

The national/global inventory space is crowded and relevancy is a hard-fought battle at times. By slicing the go-to-market program to individual locations and sub-industries, advertisers are enjoying lower competition, higher relevancy, and improved scale by a factor of tens of percentages.

“Welcome to the year of Local,” is a quote I’ve heard now from 3 different CMOs from multi-billion dollar companies. To which I reply, “Game on!”