Picnic, the Social Display Ad Marketplace, is putting the power of its premium social-style advertising directly in the hands of publishers with the launch of its self-service Picnic Studio tool, which enables media owners to design and create custom ads in minutes.
Studio opens up Picnic’s in-house creative platform to publishers for the first time. Whereas Picnic has traditionally designed and sold its Stories and Posts formats on behalf of digital publishers, the new offering lets those publishers create and sell Picnic ads direct to their clients in return for just an ad-serving charge.
Studio is built on top of Picnic’s original Stories and AMP monetisation solution, which has been monetising premium publisher editorial content for the last 18 months. This product, built by the small, bootstrapped London start-up beat three large American companies to win the prestigious Best New Supply Side Product or Service at The Wires Global in December 2020, beating Xandr, GumGum and Magnite, all $1bn+ companies.
Studio and the AMP Monetisation solution are purposefully built to solve publisher pain points, as they battle hard for ad revenue in the face of competition from powerful social networks. Picnic works exclusively with creators of premium editorial content, delivering proprietary social formats mid-article using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology.
As Matthew Goldhill, CEO and founder of Picnic, explained the launch of Studio and the success at The Wires awards cements Picnic’s position as one of the UK’s fastest growing and most innovative ad tech companies. “Studio is our first software product and we hope it is as successful as our Stories and AMP monetisation solution, which recently beat some of the industries’ most important companies to win Best New Supply Side Product at The Wires.”
“We’re proud to have reached these milestones as a profitable company, growing organically from our revenue. It’s often assumed that the only way to grow is to raise money from investors, however, we’ve achieved VC growth levels whilst bootstrapping – this was recognised by our debut on the startups.co.uk list, coming in at 56 in our first year.”