Business owners, would you actually pay to advertise on delivery riders' bags? Trying to validate this properly before we go further
Hi everyone,
We're a small team building something in the out of home advertising space, and honestly the main reason I'm posting this is that we don't just want opinions from the handful of businesses we've already spoken to. A couple of bigger companies we talked to seemed keen, but two or three people liking an idea isn't the same as knowing whether it actually works for everyone else, restaurants, cafes, tech companies, food brands, local shops, whoever. That's why I want to hear from actual people here, not just the businesses already in our corner.
Quick explanation of what we're building. You've probably seen the big insulated box bag that Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat riders carry food in on their backs. We're building a version of that with LED screens built into it, so it can display adverts while the rider is out doing deliveries. Businesses would book advertising slots through an app, pick a time window and an area, get a price based on things like footfall and how many riders are active there at that time, upload their creative, and it goes live once it clears some basic content checks, nothing illegal, nothing offensive, that sort of thing. No agency, no big minimum spend, no waiting days for a media buyer to call you back.
This isn't a completely new idea, which I think is actually a point in its favour rather than against it. Something similar is already running in China. Static, non digital versions of delivery bag advertising already exist in parts of France. There's also a company already doing something close to this on delivery motorcycles in London, just not on bikes or e-bikes, and not as a backpack. So the format has some real precedent, which is a big part of why we've been developing this properly rather than just talking about it.
What I actually want out of this post is simple. We've already had some interest from a couple of businesses, but we don't want to build this around just them. We want to know if small businesses, medium ones, big ones, whoever's reading this and might want to advertise or market themselves, would actually pay for something like this. So if that's you, would you pay for it? What would actually make you say yes? What would put you off completely?
Genuinely open to being told this is a bad idea. I'd rather hear that from strangers on Reddit than find it out later the expensive way.
If anyone wants to be kept posted as this develops, happy to share more in the comments rather than drop a link in the post itself.