The Long Tail in advertising may be SMB-centric. The Short Tail may be ad agency centered media buying, which only go to the Top 100 sites on the Web. If that’s the case, the “Mid-Tail” comes from local publishers, suggests Centro Media CEO Shawn Riegsecker. But these publishers, which rely on high value journalist-based content and integrated advertising, have lately been “losing their shirts.” They can’t scale on the Web.

For Riegsecker, whose company operates an 80 newspaper affiliate reseller program, the answer lies in automation that places media across the board — a reliance on automation he’s been touting for years but that we’re increasingly hearing for local advertisers in search (The Search Agency) and display advertisers (Balihoo).

Centro has been growing quickly, and now sports a 300 person team. Half are based in Chicago and the other half are in 28 regional offices around the U.S. Lately, the company has been especially focused on rolling out a range of automation solutions for 575 mid-tier, independent agencies that represent 2,600 advertisers.

Two weeks ago, the company rolled out Centro Planner, a planning and buying module formerly known as Transis. Additional solutions will include a campaign planning operations tool and next year, a finance app that will feature invoice and billing reconciliation.

“They all link together and automate an ad agency’s entire lifestyle,” adds Riegsecker. “They support very healthy ad agencies for a very healthy ecosystem.” By reducing the emphasis on remnant/inventory that only account for 20 percent of overall agency business, Centro helps to release resources for agencies to do data analysis, hire statisticians, and move into social, native and content marketing, he says.

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One of the big themes in local this year is the increased amount of localization in national ad campaigns. We saw it with U-Haul and Progressive Insurance a couple of weeks ago on our podium at ILM East in Boston. Those have been mostly search plays. But we also see it with display ads on national networks developed by local companies, such as Gannett and Morris. And we see it on localized efforts placed via companies such as Centro.

A mainstay in that part of the industry is Media Networks Inc., the Stamford, Connecticut-based Time Warner-owned company that specializes in localizing national advertisers in print magazines and more promisingly — given the decline in the print magazine business — a wide variety of national and local websites.

MNI dates back to 1969, but really began transforming to the digital age in 2006. Today, digital accounts for roughly $35 million, or half of its $65 million to $70 million annual revenues. Key categories include auto, health care, finance and regional banking. Education is also a big play. In addition, the company places smaller regional advertisers that want to broadcast a national-like presence via placement in national publications.

MNI Digital head Michael Nasif tells us the company works in close partnership with agencies. “You need a very specific approach to local markets,” he says, noting that a carmaker might be pushing a family van in one part of the country and a sports car in another.

While MNI is agnostic toward media channels, Nasif says the challenge is to provide more accountability at the local level. National clients are used to greater accountability from print magazines. “The nature of a paid subscriber in terms of brand value and a trustworthy approach is not automatically replicated online,” he says.

Nasif also notes, interestingly, that while tablets have been suggested as the savior of magazines, it is going to take a lot of work, given that tablet penetration is still relatively low, and that media subscriptions on tablets are a piece of a piece of that.

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In the first of many possible partnerships with local media companies, Centro has teamed up with Morris Digital Works to create a network that allows advertisers to place geo- and vertical- based ads across a broad spectrum of local and national sites. Other local media partners are likely to team with Centro on similar networks. The effort echoes earlier efforts of vertical players such as Cox’s Adify, which is now known as Cox Digital Solutions.

Centro’s network enables advertisers to place follow-on ads on other sites after they hit a consumer with an impression on one of the Morris sites, such as Augusta.com. The network can also be used when a local media site’s geo-impressions are sold out, but more local consumers are sought.

The network includes 16 prepackaged geo and vertical categories, such as sports, travel, real estate, seniors, etc. Custom categories can also be created (i.e., hunting, running, military).

Morris, as the local partner, participates in healthy markups in the 60 percent to 120 percent range, said Morris Digital Works President Michael Romaner, who was speaking at the recent Borrell conference in New York. As a secondary effort, Morris and Centro are also creating The Spectrum Network, which is limited to high-quality news sites.

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Centro, the local and regional media service company, has branched off into Web-based support for ad management. The company today announced the launch of Transis, a new division dedicated to automating the “other 80 percent” of the display industry not served by cut rate ad exchanges and demand side platforms. Specifically, Transis has been developed to make it easier for agencies and media buyers to buy premium display advertising by helping everything in one place. This includes all their research, site selection, negotiation, planning and buying, campaign management and billing reconciliation.

In development since 2005, and built at a cost of $11 million, Transis represents a significant “phase two” for Centro, which now has 11 offices and 115 employees. “First, we were helping advertisers place locally,” notes CEO Shawn Riegsecker. “The second part is build media software that would help scale the business for agencies across the U.S.”

But Riegsecker thinks the risk will pay off big time. He notes that many agencies are currently charging a premium for online ads because, ironically, of all the extra labor involved. “The fact is digital is more complex and the digital budget is much smaller. It doesn’t scale very well when contracts are held in different Outlook folders. It takes a long time to process 15 Web sites. Imagine buying 100 Web sites. It just doesn’t happen,” he says. The addition of mobile,video, social and search complicates things even more.

Riegsecker claims that Transis, which provides full-service information for 50 categories, makes buying “26 [percent] to 46 percent more efficient.” He also says it will eliminate the “double and triple entries” that plague ad buyers today. Transis, very simply, opens the way for agencies “to place more creative buys than any opportunity in the past,” he says. “It moves us into a software supported services model.”

Centro, of course, isn’t the only company moving ads into an automated environment. Google last week unveiled DoubleClick for Publishers, which provides many of the same automated features for publishers on the selling side. It will likely complement Transis’ buy-side solution.

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