Jorge Mario Valencia is the company's founder. Thirty-nine years after founding it, he still vividly recalls how the idea was born. It happened in a downtown Medellín café with a friend named Trujillo, with whom he established the company that preceded Intermedia: it was called Trujillo y Valencia.
Always Big Clients
Most startups in the country, and the world, begin by selling their products or services to those closest to them. Friends and family become loyal clients, spreading the word to help the business thrive — the domino effect.
With Intermedia (formerly Trujillo y Valencia), it was different. From the beginning, they had high-profile clients. When asked how they managed to work with big clients from the start, Valencia responded, “My partner had extensive experience. To grow like that, we had to hire experienced, seasoned employees.” So, they set out to find experts in different areas: television media, print media, illustrators, and that’s how they grew.
A Story of Change
Jorge recounts the story as if he's told it thousands of times. He knows when to pause and which anecdotes to share. Early in the company’s history, they worked for Kokoriko on a mission that may seem minor today but meant everything back then: placing the restaurant’s phone number in a traditional media outlet to launch their delivery service.
After the ad was published, the company initially assigned ten people to handle delivery orders, but they quickly became overwhelmed. A month later, it was 80 people, and eventually, 230. The city’s response to a printed newspaper ad with a phone number was so overwhelming they had to say, “Take that ad out of the newspaper.”
Through this story, Jorge explains how his field, advertising, has changed with technological advances. Years ago, advertising was analog and done traditionally. There were in-person visits with clients, not video calls or digital platforms.
In Colombia, he says, they pioneered many technologies. Initially, everything was sourced from Miami, then supplies became available in Bogotá, until Intermedia Digital finally brought them to Medellín. Large-scale printing, state-of-the-art equipment, and previously unseen technologies became trends in a city that welcomed business and technological advances.
A Tailored Service
Thanks to the Open Innovation Service we lead through our Corporation, Intermedia Publicidad solved a business challenge they encountered. Remember the newspaper ad for Kokoriko? They came up with the idea of literally democratizing advertising for small and medium-sized businesses in high-credibility national and international media outlets.
Alongside Más Alcance, the company that helped solve the challenge, they invented Clic Ads. “This is a tool that allows us to purchase digital ads in high-credibility media at low cost, achieving ten times more reach through a technology called programmatic advertising,” explained Laura Valencia, Marketing Director at Intermedia.
With this solution available on clic-ads.com for entrepreneurs, small, and medium-sized businesses, they’ve achieved 50 million ad placements at an affordable price on websites where advertising would typically be much more expensive.
Intermedia Publicidad, a Ruta N-certified company, is committed to open innovation, teamwork, and cutting-edge technology.
