Anvara Aims to Build Marketplace for Advertisers Looking for Events to Sponsor

A digital upstart thinks it has what it takes to help advertisers sweat the small stuff. Andrei Stenmark says he’s out to help marketers make sense of the so-called “IRL (in real life) economy,” or a myriad of events that might range from food festivals and bar promotions to even a pickleball tournament or the U.S. His Anvara, co-founded with Nick Khalili, offers a marketplace of intriguing promotional opportunities that might be available in a sports stadium or music festival, or at a college coffee shop, and helps arrange the details quickly thereafter.

Entrepreneurs have built empires like Airbnb out of creating a system to find temporary housing inventory in apartments and bed-and-breakfasts. Others have tried to do similar work for advertisers, like determining what TV shows and movies had opportunities for product placement, or, more recently, devising ways for smaller advertisers to utilize intellectual property from CBS programs in exchange for promoting them. Anvara seeks to organize a marketing discipline that truly generates millions, even billions, in sponsorship dollars.

So-called “out of home” advertising revenue rose 3.6% in 2025, to $9.46 billion, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, a trade organization. Reaching people at events they enjoy may be more appealing as other media channels get clogged with commercials, Stenmark suggests. You are hammered with ads, left, right, and center, some better, some quite horrible,” he says.

There may also be a chance for marketers who might not typically think of such promotions to get more involved with them. Movie studios don’t frequently sponsor live events, says Stenmark, but that’s often because they are looking to launch new films within a very short window and may not have the resources to plan for a longer term. What if, he asks, a sports team were to begin listing a six-week rotation at a stadium or sports facility?

Anvara hopes to forge tighter alliances with some of the industry’s bigger media-buying agencies, says Stenmark, a move that might open its inventory to a wider swatch of marketers, and potentially bring new events under its umbrella.