Why I Built ADbag: A Note from the Founder

I should probably begin with a confession. ADbag did not arrive in a flash of genius while I stared into the middle distance, clutching a cappuccino and muttering about disruption. It started with something far less glamorous. Boring packaging. Endless plastic bags, millions of them, pouring through the postal system every day, saying absolutely nothing, Why? At the same time brands were fighting for a half second of attention on screens that everyone was busy trying to escape. That tension sat in my head and I perused with the 'Hows' and the 'What ifs'. One day it stopped being an irritation and turned into a question. What if the bag did the talking?

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Every parcel that lands at the door is already pre qualified. The person has chosen to buy something. They are waiting for that specific package. They pick it up, carry it through the house, place it on the kitchen table, maybe move it again later. The bag is looked at, moved, handled, even if only for a short time. That is not passive media. That is a physical object that has earned its way into someone’s daily life. I kept asking myself why it was still empty space.

ADbag is my attempt to answer that question properly. On the surface it looks simple. Five sizes of high quality mailers with carefully designed layouts and a grid of brand offers, supported by QR codes that lead straight to a digital experience. Underneath that there is a different idea. Packaging is no longer a cost that quietly leaves the warehouse. It is a shared asset. Advertisers pay to appear on the bags. Sellers receive the bags free and use them for their orders. Shoppers get their parcel plus a set of curated offers that might actually be useful. The bag becomes a small value exchange that travels through the postal system.

I have spent most of my working life watching other people control my future with a spreadsheet. If you have ever sat across from a board that has decided your department is a cost centre, you will recognise the feeling. Part of ADbag is pure stubbornness. I wanted to build something where the value is obvious and where the people doing the real work are not the last to benefit. If we get this right, a small seller posting orders from their spare room can ship in packaging that looks like it belongs to a national brand. They can do that without paying for it. That matters to me.

Now to the agencies and brands who might be reading this. You live in a world of dashboards, attribution windows and “incremental lift”. You also live in a world where your clients are increasingly suspicious of anything that looks like another digital line on the plan. Everything is trackable. Far less is memorable. ADbag sits in a strange but rather useful space between those two realities. It is boring enough to get through procurement. It is interesting enough to make the creative department raise an eyebrow in a good way.

Let me paint the basic picture. We print a national run of bags. Those bags travel out through a network of sellers across the UK who have signed up to use ADbags as their default packaging. Each ad tile, each brand, each QR code is unique in our system. When a shopper scans, the phone hits our tracking link, we log what was scanned, then we move them straight on to the client page. No friction for the user. Clean data for the media team. It is very old school in one way. It is packaging. It is very modern in another. The response path lives in the mobile.

The obvious question is whether people will actually scan. I think they will, for one simple reason. Everyone already has the tool in their hand. Every current smartphone reads QR codes straight through the camera. No downloads. No explanation needed. The habit is there from menus, tickets, events and deliveries. We are not trying to teach new behaviour. We are just placing a clear invitation on the object the person is most focused on in that moment. Their parcel. If the offer is smart, the landing page is fast and the benefit is

obvious, a decent proportion of people will act.

There is another part to this that I do not want to gloss over. The sellers are not an afterthought. They are the engine. Without them this is just a lovely deck. That is why the deal for them is very simple. Commit to using our bags for your outbound parcels and we supply them free. No complicated credit. No confusing tiers. You tell us how many orders you send. We match you to a suitable volume of bags. The more you grow, the more we both win. If you run an online shop and margins already feel like tracing paper, that difference between paying for packaging and not paying for it is real.

So how do I see this unfolding over the next few years? First we prove the model at a national level in the UK. One set of five bag sizes. One coordinated 2026 line up of advertisers per cycle. One clear reporting structure that lets agencies see scans, visits and conversions by brand and by region. No overpromising. No wild claims. Just honest numbers that can sit in a QBR without anyone shifting awkwardly in their chair. Once that is stable, we extend the concept into more specialist runs. Themed bags around seasonal peaks. Bags focused on certain categories. Deep integrations with key brands who want to treat the bag as a long term platform, not a one off stunt. Then we expand. Then we tackle the US and global markets ... but baby steps to start.

On the creative side, I am quietly excited about what agencies will do once they get their

hands on the templates. You could run a single big brand statement across multiple tiles. You could build a story that unfolds as the bag is turned over. You could treat the whole format like a collaborative poster where several brands play nice together and the shopper ends up with something they want to keep for a while. It could be made into a collectors item; like Pokemon or World Cup stickers. I have my own ideas, of course, but part of the thrill here is handing the brush to people who do this for a living and seeing what they paint.

Will this change packaging forever? That is a big claim and I am allergic to empty hype, so I will answer it this way. I believe packaging will never go back to being ignored. Once brands realise that the parcel is a media touchpoint, they will either use ADbag or something that looks a lot like it. Once sellers realise their packaging can be both free and better looking, they will not race back to plain white bags. Once shoppers start to expect a small layer of discovery on the outside of the parcel, they will notice when it is missing. In that sense the shift is permanent. The only open question is who moves first and who is still debating it while everyone else is shipping.

If you are an agency person reading this, whether junior planner or managing partner, I would like you to see ADbag as a new tool on the shelf. Not a silver bullet. Not the hero of the whole campaign. A new way to put ideas into people’s homes with a level of control and measurement that makes sense in the world you live in. If you are a seller, I want you to see it as a chance to punch above your weight, to ship orders in packaging that feels premium and to give your customers a few extra reasons to be glad they bought from you.

This is our first blog and in many ways the first proper public statement of what I want ADbag to be. A shared channel where brands, agencies, sellers and shoppers all get something out of the same square of plastic. I am not naïve about the work ahead. There are partners to recruit, campaigns to build, printers to keep on schedule and plenty of hard yards to cover before this looks as smooth as I know it can. But I am certain of one thing. The idea is sound. The timing is right. The bags are ready.

If you are curious, sceptical or already picturing your client’s logo on that grid, reach out. Let us have a real conversation about how your next idea can travel through the letterbox instead of fighting for another tired impression on a screen. That is where I see ADbag going. Out into the world, one very talkative parcel at a time.