CEO’s letter

Bidstack is maturing as a business as we focus on ensuring our technology underpins the growing in-game advertising economy to achieve our $100 million revenue goal over the medium term.

2022 will be looked back upon as the year when the company made the operational shift from early stage to a scale-up business.

The functionality of our monetisation offering to developers, additional use-cases for our technology across the game studios we are working alongside, grow our network of titles, encourage the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and MRC (Media Rating Council) to establish clear guidelines for measurement within the in-game advertising industry and licensing our technology.

Looking back at 2022 we achieved all of our operational targets.

The IAB and MRC published guidelines through June and August of 2022 for intrinsic in-game advertising, the in-gameplay format. This step has seen the quantity and size of the request for proposals multiply through the last 12 months. Media buying software, the demand-side platforms (DSP) are adopting intrinsic in-game as a format and we are seeing global demand increasing.

We will see through 2023, intrinsic in-game on the open exchange, meaning fully automated trading of our inventory. This would not have been possible without the increased lobbying and efforts of our team working with the advertising community to promote gaming as a format.

We’re expecting automated trading of our in-game contracted inventory to make up a third of our 2023 revenue, which will continue to grow as a proportion.

As we have refined our offering to being a gaming supply-side platform (SSP) and a content management system (CMS) tool, we have added additional formats into our network. 

We are empowering game developers and publishers to control all advertising spaces through our AdConsole portal.

We now empower developers to monetise intrinsic in-game, reward-video, in-menu and sponsorship activations, all through our platform. This makes Bidstack the only gaming SSP with this capability relative to our competition.

Why is this important? Game publishers have made it clear they don’t want multiple monetisation platforms or SDKs to manage, so having one clear offering stands us out as a logical partner. With our portfolio of titles growing to over 250 contracted, up 4x this time last year. We can see our impact in the gaming ecosystem is growing.

From our initial move into the gaming space, we’ve ensured we build out our own proprietary technology stack, protect our processes with patents and ensure that the platform could be licensed to third parties, potentially under a white-label. In 2022, we signed our first licensed customer, Adways.

We entered into an agreement with Adways, where they will onboard games themselves in Asia Pacific, on to our white-labelled SSP, before connecting their buy-side demand to our platform and run their own in-game advertising business. Bidstack takes a percentage of everything sold, whilst providing technical support and our infrastructure. Low touch, high margin.

We’ve seen that sports teams have had a desire to utilise our platform. To date, sports rights holders, such as teams or leagues, haven’t been able to control their virtual IP, whether that be pitch, track or court-side hoardings, shirt sponsorships, car liveries or skins, in real-time.

Through our AdConsole, sports IP can target messaging via their brand partners to gamers based on their age, geo, gender or anything happening within the gameplay. Whether it be a success or failure within the game.

As a club or franchise, teams can connect with fans of their team, using spaces within the gaming application to communicate on a one-to-one level. If a team has just won the ‘championship’ they are competing with, just like with the teams’ social media reach, messaging can instantly be pushed out around their gaming IP to reflect that real-world success, complete with offers to their loyal or net-new fanbase.

Teams are able to monetise themselves, or if they wish, can add their inventory to take advantage of Bidstack’s marketplace.

The initial contract with Azerion was for global exclusivity, but as it became clear that Azerion’s sales footprint didn’t stretch beyond Europe, the company took the decision to add boots on the ground in the US, the biggest advertising market.

Bidstack and Azerion carved out territories from the global agreement to ensure that Azerion’s lack of sales footprint didn’t harm our gaming network. The resellers we took on across APAC, India and MENA have given our company true global reach to the advertising community.

Azerion has not honoured their side of the contract and failed to pay for the services Bidstack Group provided, thus Bidstack is pursuing Azerion for unpaid invoices.

This has given Bidstack the commercial freedom to connect the growing list of demand sources directly into our SSP and the team we have in place now makes us more confident than ever before that the company is about to have a revenue break-out.

We have the commercial freedom, vision and focus to execute throughout 2023 and beyond to establish Bidstack as the central infrastructure for in-game monetisation and player engagement tools.

The coming months and years will be exciting for us all to share with the shareholders who have supported the company as we’ve gone from a listed startup to now a scale-up.

Thank you to everyone who has helped the company get to this point.

James