Can you tell me about your background and where Bidstack fits into this?

I can confidently say that if I didn’t have the friends I’d had growing up, I never would have returned to London in 2014 to work with one of them, nor would I have played ‘Championship Manager’ or ‘Football Manager’ as the Sports Interactive franchise is now called. In turn, I would never have pivoted Bidstack’s digital out of home (DOOH) platform to focus on in-game brand and messaging activations. Working with Sports Interactive, founder of one of the most loved franchises in sports games, brings things full circle and is an honour.

What does Bidstack do?

Bidstack’s technology empowers game developers to generate revenue from brand activations within their games. The game publishers map our technology into spaces like billboards, car liveries, shirt sponsors etc - and our platform offers up those spaces to the world's biggest brands to buy and display advertising, in real-time, in those in-gameplay areas. Targeted on a per player basis - so, you and your friends can all be in the same game at the same time, everything in the gameplay is the same, except for the advertising, which is specific to individual users.

What is the importance of this technology? 

Have you ever tried communicating to someone when they’re fully immersed in their favourite game? It’s arguably even harder than trying to have a sensible dialogue during a nail-biting football game, or in a film’s closing scene. The power of association, for a brand to align themselves with memorable moments and experiences that take place in these games, is something that’s not been possible for media planners, at scale, before. With our technology, game publishers don’t have to do any work - once we’ve mapped the spaces in the environment and our SDK is active, there is no studio load on running these activations, so it’s passive revenue for the publishers and the first time media planners can target gamers, in real-time, based on the game they play, their age, location and gender.

Could you tell me about the specific technology involved?

Bidstack’s platform is proprietary and our SDK is installed into the code base of the game. We are a supply side platform (SSP) and a content management system (CMS). An SSP is how we house all of the advertising inventory within a gaming application, and the CMS is how we control those spaces - being able to swap out advertising or even just messaging on a player to player basis, as our server gets pinged to show x targeted demographic profile is online. That information is then fed back to the advertiser, through our AdConsole platform, for campaign analysis.

How many are on your team and how have you grown to where you are today?

It’s been a long journey - 8 years so far, and we’re now starting to scale. We’re over 70 heads in total, spread across the US, UK and mainland Europe.

How do you differentiate from your competitors?

The use-cases for our technology stretch beyond purely an advertiser, via an agency, buying in-game advertising space. We are now working with sports teams who utilise our platform to control their virtual stadia, across multiple platforms and titles, to enable them to communicate to fans on a one-to-one basis, through in-gameplay and in-application spaces within the games they sell their IP to. We aren’t purely brand activation, but a fan engagement platform for the virtual world.

Could you discuss your funding process?

We initially scraped funding from friends and family in the early days, before going through a Crowdcube round in 2015. This gave the company a platform and a standout position in the initial industry we entered - DOOH advertising. In 2017, when we pivoted into gaming with our contract with Football Manager, we took the option to reverse into a cash shell on the AIM market, in 2018. We have since raised a total of c.$42 million as the company has established the in-game advertising market. Too many moments to list, but growing a company in the public eye is not for the faint hearted!

What has been the biggest overall challenge so far?

Recognising the time that was required to create a net-new market, and the challenges that come with that, balancing the scaling, hiring individuals into a net-new market that had limited transferable skills early on. It’s a marathon - but one that’s worth running.

What has been your highlight so far?

Again, too many to list - working with some of the biggest brands, publishers and companies on the planet to develop this industry together, has been enormously satisfying. And working with a great team to deliver this. We are building something special.

What is next for Bidstack? 

There’s a number of areas, but it’s obsessing over the multiple seats and use-cases we can have for our platform. We are obsessed over our publisher customers - how can we make Bidstack’s suite of tools ever more useful to generate revenue, whilst saving time and money for the studios.