Carsales overhauls media set-up, looks to be ‘true marketing partner’ and spruiks 5M monthly reach
Carsales’ media arm, Mediahouse signalled its new strategic direction at its Open House Upfront yesterday, as it looks to harness the potential of the ‘platform economy’ for its marketing partners and leverage its almost 11 million members.
Carsales match will deliver people-based marketing through a new strategic partnership with Adobe.
Davor Vilusic
Alongside Carsales match, the brand also launched ‘Ignition’, a self-service offering Carsales said helps it embrace the ‘platform economy’, while also taking to market ‘Fuse’, a new team of in-house specialists looking to deliver on full funnel executions on client briefs.
The overhaul, commercial director for media (strategy, trading, ad operations) at Carsales, Davor Vilusic told Mumbrella began more than three years ago, needing a new strategic direction to address the evolution of the business, “and those evolutions were to address the challenges that were ahead of us”, which are the same that businesses are facing now, he said as they have been delayed due to COVID.
He added the aim was to elevate the brand’s proposition and outcomes within its category, and beyond it also. This includes figuring out how to utilise its strongest asset, its data.
Vanya Mariani
Vilusic said covering the automotive, finance, and government categories, “the three largest by revenue behind retails”, and the scale of the company has meant it wanted to ensure it was providing the same level of service to its advertisers that they could expect from some of the largest global platforms.
The new Carsales match product will allow marketers the ability to use “rich profiling data” from online and offline sources to segment and target known customers. It will also give advertisers the ability to build “look-a-likes” of their customers for prospecting and target audiences to improve efficiency.
Vilusic said because of the secure environment Carsales provides its users, “people are a lot more receptive to advertising”.
“They’re receptive because it actually helps them transact, research and buy. The advertising is not there to disrupt their experience, it’s there to complement the experience.”
He also emphasised the “premium environment” the platform offers to advertisers, as it looks to provide full-funnel opportunities, from an activation and measurement standpoint.
“The difference that we’re actually trying to provide is, you do your strategy based on the same data set, which is in real time, it’s not based on panels or survey data that might be outdated. It’s happening in real-time. That data is what informs what you are buying.
So the same audience that you’re doing the insights with is the audience that you’re targeting and lastly using the same data to measure it. And we feel that in our category and beyond no one can actually achieve on that because they don’t have the necessary data that we have.”
The event also featured a panel discussion moderated by IAB CEO, Gai Le Roy
The Ignition platform is aimed at ‘everybody’ he said, not just direct to brands or through agency partners, but addresses the needs his team is seeing from all customer types.
“Some might use it purely for buying and activating, others might use it to inform their strategy. OEMs, agencies, strategies within agencies, all the way through to marketers themselves.
Vilusic said this is part of Carsales’ evolution to moving away from being seen as a car portal and becoming seen as a true marketing partner.
“Our strength is that we are category based. That’s where we go deeper, differently. But we reach over 5 million people on a monthly basis, and that’s a high percentage of the Australian population, and those people live normal lives outside of just buying cars.”
“So we do feel there’s an opportunity to really go deep in our category, but at the same time open up the door for advertisers outside of our category to be able to reach audiences within our environment.”
Commercial director for media (sales and customer solutions), Vanya Mariani added that over 25 years, Carsales has been able to build a “unique dataset which, via our team and latest technology, more than ever empowers marketers to make informed, meaningful decisions to deliver exceptional business outcomes”.
“We have been evolving our operating model over the last two years to bring together the best talent, deepest insights and most innovative technology to deliver for our clients. And now it’s game on.”
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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