The Ad Agency That Learned to Count Past the Click

There is a certain kind of number that advertising agencies like. A trophy count. An impression count. A click-through rate presented to three decimal places. Smith Kroeger, an Omaha agency whose family tree begins in 1962, has one of those too: a campaign click-through rate reported at 80 percent above the benchmark for its format. But the number that explains the firm is much less digital. It is 2.6 million scratch tickets.

The Nebraska Lottery wanted to maximize sales of Trucks & Bucks, a game dangling eight Ford F-150s in front of Nebraska players. Smith Kroeger built two humorous television commercials and then ran a second media flight so the joke would not wear thin. The game sold out on the client’s desired schedule. More than 2.6 million tickets moved, producing more than $4 million in sales and averaging $137,000 a week.

That case study contains the Smith Kroeger proposition in miniature. Start with something the client’s finance team can recognize. Make work people will notice. Keep the media fresh. Measure the commercial event at the other end. The company calls itself “business-disciplined,” which sounds like a phrase invented to stop a copywriter from purchasing a fog machine. Here, it has a practical meaning.

The agency with a newspaper man’s question

Smith Kroeger began as Smith Kaplan, founded in Omaha by Wayne Smith and Ron Kaplan. It bought Allen and Reynolds in 1972, accumulated the wonderfully corporate name Smith Kaplan Allen & Reynolds, and eventually let the initials do the work: SKAR. The organization lived through the age of three television networks, cable abundance, the commercial internet and the moment every local car dealer discovered programmatic display.

Then, in January 2019, Terry Kroeger bought 100 percent of the agency from the Smith family and its partners. Kroeger was not an ad-agency lifer. He had spent 33 years in newspapers, ultimately running BH Media Group and publishing the Omaha World-Herald. He understood both sides of the old bargain: how media creates attention and how advertisers decide what that attention is worth.

“If we can’t make the cash register ring, then you shouldn’t hire us.”Terry Kroeger, chairman and CEO

The first move was not to erase the old firm. Kroeger described finding a sound business, deep tradition and talented people already in place. He proposed additions that grew naturally from his operating experience: business consulting, strategic planning, public relations and crisis communications. Two months after the purchase, SKAR became Smith Kroeger. The new promise was “Accelerate.” The inherited skills remained; the brief got wider.

What “full service” looks like when it is real

An agency menu can resemble a diner menu: very long, mildly alarming, and difficult to believe one kitchen can cook every item. Smith Kroeger lists seven main disciplines - creative, digital, web development, traditional media, public relations, strategy and consulting, and branding. The more persuasive evidence is how those disciplines meet inside client work.

For Baxter Auto Group, the agency works as an extension of an in-house team serving 20 dealerships. It studies vehicle inventory, competitive pricing and shopping behavior, then operates campaigns across paid social, digital video, display, streaming audio, traditional channels and even VIN-specific tactics. Baxter reported increases in sales and service appointments across its dealerships. The agency is not simply making car ads. It is watching the moving machinery of a dealer group and changing the communications around it.

For FNBO, the difficult product is coordination. Smith Kroeger manages traditional media for more than 100 bank branches across eight states, dealing with more than 100 networks, publishers and vendors. For Cape School, an education provider, it created 60 simultaneous campaigns across search, digital video, display, email and custom landing pages, with revenue attribution attached. One client needs reach; another needs a control room.

Its customers reflect the middle of the American economy more than one fashionable vertical: banks, auto groups, construction companies, schools, insurers, public utilities, government programs and consumer brands. Some are Omaha institutions. Others operate nationally. Smith Kroeger has also opened an Auburn, Alabama office, giving the firm a base for clients across the Southeast.

A dog named FIDO guards the brand

The most ownable item on the service list is FIDO, a branding process whose name comes from fidus, Latin for faithful. It has four steps: Foundation, Ideation, Delivery and Optimization. The charm is not the acronym. The charm is that the method makes the invisible work visible.

Foundation ends in a research-heavy Brand Report. Ideation converts that evidence into creative briefs and presents the reasoning behind the concepts. Delivery includes usable files, templates or media placements. Optimization acknowledges what branding decks often avoid: the mark is finished, but the business is not. Formats change. Campaigns need variants. A family of products emerges. The account manager stays involved.

This is also where Smith Kroeger differs from a specialist shop. A client can hire a brilliant studio for an identity, a media agency for reach, a developer for the website and a PR firm for the launch. Or it can put those dependencies in one room. Integration is valuable when the problem crosses boundaries and expensive when it does not. A small organization needing one clean logo may not require the orchestra. A bank coordinating 100 branches probably does.

The merger said more than the price

In August 2025, Smith Kroeger acquired Redstone Communications Group from Jim Svoboda and Stacy Vance. The terms were not disclosed. The operating choices were. Kroeger said there were no planned staff reductions, praised the similarity of the cultures, and arranged for the combined team to work from Smith Kroeger’s building in Omaha’s Old Mill office park.

Redstone’s work widened the proof set. A Certified Transmission campaign used IP-address-level retargeting: when the company or a competitor appeared on connected television, a Certified pre-roll ad could appear on another device in the household within five seconds. The campaign served 1,022,851 impressions, reported a click-through rate 80 percent above the average for that execution and achieved an 80 percent video completion rate. This time, the click mattered because the design of the experiment made it interpretable.

The risk in such systems is obvious. Measurement can become theater. An agency can optimize the easiest number while the hard outcome stays still. Kroeger’s answer is continuous attention: learn the client’s economics and personalities, watch performance, do more of what works and less of what does not. He has warned against shiny objects, even while the firm invests in the tools required to test them.

The useful part you can steal

Smith Kroeger’s method is not proprietary in the way a patent is proprietary. That makes it more useful. A marketing team can borrow the sequence without hiring the firm: define a business outcome, examine the customer and competition, make more than one creative option, connect distribution to measurement and preserve room to change the plan.

The conditions matter. This approach weakens when a client cannot share sales data, cannot approve changes quickly, or cannot afford enough reach to learn anything. It also struggles when every stakeholder wants a different objective. Measurement does not rescue a confused brief; it merely gives the confusion a dashboard.

What Smith Kroeger sells, then, is not merely a collection of services. It sells the reduction of handoffs and uncertainty. Its creative people can see the media plan. Its media people can see the commercial target. Its web team can build the landing place. Its account managers can watch what happens next. After 64 years, the company’s most modern habit may be the simplest one: count all the way to the thing the client actually wanted.