BIDS.L Regulatory News (BIDS)

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30 March 2020

Bidstack Group plc

("Bidstack" or the "Company")

COVID-19 Business Update

Bidstack (AIM: BIDS.L), the native in-game advertising group, provides the following business update in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Company has noted that restrictions on movement and the cancellation of live sporting events is leading to the video games industry witnessing record numbers of daily active users, concurrent players and hours played.

According to the operators of the Company's first fully operational programmatic title, Football Manager 20 hosted over 180,000 concurrent players worldwide on 22 March 2020, a record for the game, making it the third most played game on Steam, the video game distribution service.

According to the Facteus Insight Report on Consumer Spending and Transactions (a weekly report on the impact of COVID-19 on the consumer economy in the US) published on 25 March 2020, spending on video games (both online and offline), which has seen strong growth for most of 2020 so far, began to surge in the week of 9 March 2020 and year on year is up over 60% in the week of 16 March 2020.

As a result of the increase in games consumption, Bidstack's virtual out of home environment, with its global reach and ability to engage committed sports and video games fans through native in-game advertising, is currently experiencing high levels of inbound demand from advertising agencies and has received some exciting and unexpected commercial opportunities.

Our demand teams are now working with multiple agency groups, both inside and outside our existing trading frameworks, to help them fill the gap generated by the absence of live sporting events and the obvious reduction in the effect of out of home advertising. We are also working with a number of Bidstack approved resellers in territories where we have no "official" presence around the globe running programmatic and insertion order campaigns.

Amongst other things we are pleased to be commencing our first campaign in a new game from a global leader in digital interactive entertainment on 6 April 2020.

As expected during this unprecedented period the business has suffered some disruption, mainly due to a number of trade shows having been cancelled. This has clearly had an impact on the face to face meetings that had been scheduled to take place during those events.

Despite this, the systems and procedures our department leads have put in place, along with our technology-based platform, are ensuring that, from an operational standpoint, Bidstack's business is largely able to proceed as normal.

James Draper, CEO of Bidstack commented: 

"COVID-19 has created an unprecedented economic and social climate. Our first concern has been to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all our staff, who are now working safely from home.

"Disruption to the advertising industry, particularly in the out of home and live sports segments, is leading media buyers to seek digital alternatives for their brands. It's no longer "business as usual" in these significant areas. Agencies need to innovate to assist their brand clients to reach targeted audiences. Bidstack's technology enables them to do that.

"Our team is working closely with agency groups to help them test, report and activate larger campaigns across our growing portfolio of titles through this period.

"I look forward to updating the market further as things progress and will continue to support our employees, customers and prospects during this busy and unprecedented time."

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About Bidstack

Bidstack is an advertising technology company which provides dynamic, targeted and automated native in-game advertising for the global video games industry across multiple platforms. Its proprietary API technology is capable of inserting adverts into natural advertising space within video games across multiple video games platforms (mobile, PC and console).

Bidstack's customers are games publishers and developers and advertising agencies, brands and programmatic advertising platforms. Bidstack contracts exclusive access to the native in-game advertising space within video games from their developers or publishers and sells that advertising space either direct to specific brands and their agencies or through programmatic advertising platforms.