Bidstack will be a real-time bidding (RTB) platform for unsold, last-minute available digital signage across multiple networks.

We want to make digital advertising boards available to the masses, by lowering the barriers to entry from both a financial and creative point of view. Our customers won’t even need a video production agency to create advertising copy for the space, as we aim to build an area on our site with pre-designed templates comparable to Moonpig or Videohive. Our marketing dashboard is a free-to-use service. Additionally, we are aiming for the Bidstack portal to solve a problem for the advertising networks (the companies who own the rights to sell space on the screens) by filling any dead space that goes unsold, without their typical costs of sale.

Digital advertising board space is traditionally sold in days, weeks and months – whereas we are looking to sell by minutes and hours, online, via a bidding platform, and without a reserve price. We aim to sit between buyers and sellers, taking a fee from each transaction. We won’t passively buy the space and then sell it on, rather we are building live integrations into the advertising network’s booking systems. We will only show space that’s unsold and within one week of the go-live date, up until 30 minutes before the alotted time.

To do this we have made tracks to build relationships with the networks such as J.C Decaux and Exterion Media and a major UK poster specialist/buyer, who place campaigns for High Street names across multiple networks. We believe our cloud based portal has global scale and reach with routes to market scale into Europe, the US, and beyond. 

Our plan is to make digital out of home advertising truly accessible for anyone – from a small cake shop flash-selling perishable goods two hours before closing, a brand A/B testing campaigns, to telling a loved one you love them as they make their commute. We believe the possibilities are vast.

We believe the shareholder value of Bidstack will be grounded in the returning subscribers on our platform. Our aim is to add Bidstack’s dashboard into the daily behavior of owners and marketing teams, by offering useful real-time data that empowers them to make reactive localised promotional decisions. We strive to continually add new, interesting and engaging elements to position Bidstack as the go-to online marketing hub ahead of our Go Live date for BETA in late January. By the summer of 2016 we aim to have over 10,000 UK users regularly using our dashboard, upon which to scale our wider growth.

With the aim of building key strategic and technical partnerships, we have started conversations with businesses that are already working with and through SME’s. Subsequently we will position Bidstack as an additional value-added service to their existing and new customer bases, with the aim to extend the breadth and depth of data usable in the Bidstack portal and facilitate access to large, applicable user bases. 

Appear Here (one of the UK’s largest online marketplaces for retail space) – with over 10,000 brands searching the database at any one time, agreed a commercial arrangement with Bidstack to offer our service to their customers as a value-add. 

Braintree Payments – We are planning to use Braintree handle our screen payments and have started to integrate this, and they have received our application for their Start Tank office space in PayPal’s London offices. Selecting Braintree was obvious – part of PayPal – who in our eyes have a decent track record of online bidding and start-ups. 

iZettle – We are in early stage discussions with iZettle who enable small and pop-up businesses to accept card payments from their mobile devices; as such we believe they would be an ideal partner in reaching local businesses keen to promote their services. 

Whaleslide – we like to think of as our ‘search engine specialists’, working with us to build what we hope to be a data-rich marketing dashboard that gives localised and/or industry specific information business-critical data e.g. weather, social media trending topics, news stories, traffic information etc.

The Plan

Startup royalty is our ‘buzz phrase’. Funding from the masses to support and promote a business for the masses!  We raised £40,000 in June 2015 which allowed us to build an alpha bidding system, create our video advert, work on our technical collaboration with Whaleslide and take an office space to grow out the team. We were delighted with the attendance of our video launch at the O2, with over 160 tickets sold, and we have experienced what we consider to be significant fallout.