56. Picnic Media

Founder: Matthew Goldhill
Founded: 2018
Website: www.picnic-media.com

As the world has rushed headlong into a mobile, online media landscape, the advertising industry as a whole has been scrambling to catch up. Banner ads, the most common form of online advertising, are ugly, intrusive and, paradoxically, easily ignored.

So Picnic Media is here to help. It has developed new ad formats that fit seamlessly into editorial content – and more importantly – dramatically increase engagement (in other words, people actually pay attention to them).

Picnic was founded by Matthew Goldhill in 2018, and its key innovation is an ad format inspired by social video. Static, video or slideshow ads are inserted into articles, with the reader scrolling past them as they read. This provides publishers with high-quality ads that are difficult to avoid, and give advertisers a much more intuitive and natural way to capture attention. It’s already being used by the likes of Microsoft, Next, and Sainsburys, who are benefiting from increased ROI and greater visibility.

To support this, Picnic has also built the only ad format specifically designed for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages. This is Google tech that’s designed to speed up the mobile internet, and is already used by over 25 million domains. This assures advertisers that their ads are running on sites optimised for the mobile internet, meaning they will load instantly and generate more attention.

Picnic is already working with leading online publishers and is on track to quadruple its revenue in 2020, all from a small amount of seed funding.

As it continues to carve out its expert niche, we expect the company to continue this rapid growth, and keep improving the mobile internet experience.