With its user experience dialed-in, Halifax advertising startup Picture Pick has begun marketing itself to potential ad-buyers and bagged a deal with entertainment giant NBCUniversal Media.

Picture Pick’s app gamefies advertising by encouraging players to choose their favourite images or ads from a collection of 60 and then holding sweepstakes that award cash prizes to the people who choose the winning ads. The payouts range from $25 for players who choose four winning images to $25,000 if someone manages to select all six.

“We wanted to create an environment where an advertiser’s message is actively welcomed,” said CEO Ciaran Doherty, “rather than what happens so many times nowadays, where people just ignore advertising.”

Doherty and his family own the popular The Middle Spoon Desserterie & Bar in downtown Halifax, and its sister establishment, Noble Speakeasy. He said Picture Pick was inspired by his own need to find a more effective way to advertise his restaurants.

“My family get together every Sunday to have dinner, or at least we did before the pandemic,” he said. “I was watching a hockey game with my nephew, and an advertisement comes on the TV, and he was almost offended that someone would interrupt to show him an advertisement.

“And where my head went was, ‘He’s going to be old enough to be in my bar in another couple of years. And if this is how young people are responding to being shown ads, I need to find a better way to communicate.’”

The usefulness of conventional ad formats remains an open question in the world of marketing, but at least one survey has suggested that as many as 60 percent of consumers can’t remember the last advertisement they saw.

Picture Pick’s prizes are meant to increase the amount of attention users pay to ads as they wait to see whether they chose winners.

Doherty launched Picture Pick on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in April, 2019, and about 23,000 people have created accounts. The game has 119 reviews in the Apple App Store, and 311 on Google Play. Picture Pick was recently recognized at the Horizon Interactive Awards in Indianapolis, a major award for interactive media that drew 600 entries from 15 countries. The game received a gold award for the Mobile Apps – Games category and a silver award in the Mobile Apps – Entertainment category.

Doherty said he’s confident Picture Pick is now ready to onboard more advertising clients, but he’s doing so cautiously.

The cost of offering cash prizes means that the user base and ad revenue need to scale in tandem, in what he describes as a “careful balancing act.” Too many users and too few advertisers could be financially damaging, but he needs a large user base to attract big-ticket advertisers.

Doherty has hired a business development specialist based in Toronto, and the feedback he has received from several potential advertisers has been that he needs to reach about 50,000 users in order to reliably onboard large clients.

“They’re saying to us, ‘Hey, we love this. When you get to 50,000 users, we’ll jump in,’” he said.

Advertisers currently pay $1,500 per month to be included in the Picture Pick game, but Doherty said that number could increase as more users sign up. Eventually, he hopes to transition to a “cost-per-mile” model, common in online advertising, which will see ad buyers pay based on the amount of engagement an ad generates.

So far, Doherty has self-funded the business, but plans to raise money soon although he has not yet decided how much.

“Coming from bricks-and-mortar, I wanted to have a business that I knew made sense before I started actively asking people to invest,” he said. “I liked the idea of something tangible that I could put in people’s hands so they could play with it.”

To keep costs down, Doherty outsourced the process of coding the app to mobile software specialist TekRevol, based in Houston. But as the company grows, he expects to hire programmers and move development work in-house. Those hires will flesh out Doherty’s small team, which so far includes just himself and the business development specialist.