AdviDeals is a Brisbane-based group-buying website offering advertising deals to small and large businesses on a daily basis.

 

Operating exclusively as a B2B platform, AdviDeals also enables media owners to present their advertising media to business owners and marketers who are looking for new opportunities.

 

Founding director Brenton Tickner says the idea came about after working with companies keen to experiment with advertising, but constrained by the financial risk of trying something new.

 

Along with his colleague Rachael Williams, Tickner talks to StartupSmart about the pros and cons of working with media owners, and using Tony Abbott’s bathers as a marketing ploy.

 

What niche did you identify with AdviDeals?

After several years’ experience in marketing and related services, we identified significant opportunity for a platform introducing advertisers to media owners.

 

Our experience has shown advertisers, particularly those in the SME sector, are generally reluctant to try new advertising opportunities due to the perceived costs, without any guarantee of a result, and are often overwhelmed by the very broad range of options on the average rate card, ie. positional loading, sport colour, full colour loading, cost per column inch, etc.

 

Over the last three to four years, we’ve also noticed that marketing budgets are getting tighter and SMEs are more cautious about trying something new, even if it could help them immensely.

 

As a result, we developed AdviDeals so that we can work directly with media owners to present a simple, packaged offering to potential advertisers at a minimum 40% discount from market rate to inspire new interest in the media owner’s advertising.

 

This allows media owners to showcase their ideal advertising packages to a completely new and potentially long-term customer base, and provides advertisers the incentive to try new forms of advertising to establish if it works for them.

 

How long did you work on the business before you launched it?

The idea for the model came during a team discussion in the first half of this year. We’re currently nearing the second stage of our two-stage launch.

 

Our initial launch occurred in September and we’ve since been working behind the scenes to build our subscriber base and finalise testing of our website.

 

We are expecting to launch stage two within the coming weeks, which will see our first deals go live.

 

How did you fund the business?

A lot of the expertise required to launch the site and bring the model to market is in-house thanks to the diversity of our start-up team, so we were able to self-fund the launch.

 

It’s difficult to say what our total start-up costs are but the only real outsourced cost would be some of our website development.

 

How many staff do you have?

To date, we’ve focused on getting the business up and running with minimal outside involvement, and have managed to do the bulk of the work with just our three directors, a graphic designer and a web developer.

 

The diverse background of our team, stemming from accounting and corporate advisory, IT, marketing and PR, has enabled us to handle the majority of work in-house.

 

How do you promote the business?

Given AdviDeals provides such a unique platform, we’ve been able to attract a lot of PR from our business model.

 

Our initial launch strategy just involved a media release to key marketing magazines, designed to get media owners onboard. The response was overwhelming.

 

Shortly after, we saw a unique opportunity to use our positioning as an innovative advertising platform to promote a charity we all support, and launched a campaign to sell advertising space on Tony Abbott’s budgie smugglers to raise funds for surf lifesavers.

 

Although we were able to obtain great support from the media and public, we could not win over Tony Abbott’s representatives.