What you need to know:

• Carsales has launched its new media division, ‘carsales mediahouse’. It has three sections: Ignition, a self-serve ad platform; Fuse, an in-house team of strategy and brief specialists; and carsales match, its CDP and data play.
• Carsales banked more than $300m in the 2022 financial year from selling digital ads. $54.5m of that came from media budgets – a 15 per cent increase, and that is an area they see more potential for growth. The rest came from members of the public and dealers.
• Its Adobe customer data platform uses 10.9 million signed-in user email addresses and billions of behavioural touch points to demonstrate success in campaigns.
• A data partnership with Audience360 means Carsales is vying for non-automotive brands to consider spending on the platform. “We’re a category-based player, we reach a very large percentage of the internet population – and they lead human lives outside looking for cars,” commercial director for media, Davor Vilusic, says.

Top gear

ASX-listed classifieds business Carsales says it can compete with the major broadcasters for ad dollars, unveiling a new ‘mediahouse’ division to entice agency spend, lure wider advertisers, and leverage 10.9 million active, email address-supplying members.

The auto sector is returning to normality after supply chain issues and a booming second-hand market, Commercial Director for Media, Davor Vilusic, said, and Carsales has not been idle during Covid. The $6.68-billion business has spent the past two plus years building an Adobe-backed Customer Data Platform (CDP) – culling 7m email addresses from its 17.8m stores in the process to make sure they had the right consent and privacy in place.

“The depth [of our data] is unrivalled. Our deterministic email address numbers are really high and can compete with the largest broadcast businesses in Australia,” Vilusic said.

Carsales, which owns auto classified websites in Mexico, Chile, South Korea – and recently fully acquired US-based Trader Interactive, is a $300m-a-year digital advertising company in Australia, adding another $200m through its other services and global platforms. Of its Australian ad revenue, $183m came from dealers, $69m came from private sales, and $54.5m came through other media.

The new Carsales mediahouse arm, launched at an upfront event on Tuesday, will include a self-service ad buying platform called Ignition, an in-house strategy and campaign team, Fuse, and the audience profiling platform, Carsales match. Ignition will let media buyers plan and buy an array of display and native ad products, using metrics like ‘consideration lift’ – a brand’s share of search in its category, and ‘action lift’ – the actions a reader takes beyond browsing.

“We haven’t had a self-serve platform,” said Vilusic. “It’s always been through a standard brief-response offering. We aren’t removing that service, but what we are trying to do is provide the autonomy and the speed our customers have been asking from us.”

Cars an entry to other verticals

Carsales match has also meant creating a unique Carsales ID, a “unified ID for our environment” matching member details, email addresses and, for the 60 per cent of users who have provided one, phone numbers.

“What we are focusing on is not so much the breadth of the data, even though we have large scalable numbers. We’re focusing on the depth,” Vilusic said. “Carsales is a search engine for the category. People come to our environment and search for the cars, and filter by the filtering options. That gives us insights about what people are searching for.”

There are 5m unique viewers each month to website, generating 2.5 billion behavioural signals every 90 days that are added to the Carsales ID.

A data partnership with Audience360 means advertisers can build segments that add more detail about Carsales’ audience.

“That gives us insight into things outside our category… to enrich and understand the interests of the audience beyond the car purchasing behaviour,” Vilusic said. “Travel [data] comes from Webjet, Mozo for finance, realestateview for rent, Future Publishing, AFL for sport.”

While Carsales works with agencies already, Vilusic insists, the self-serve platform and data mean it hopes it can go outside the auto vertical.

“We’re a category-based player, we reach a very large percentage of the internet population – and they lead human lives outside looking for cars,” he said. “We feel we can play a role there. We have a niche and deep expertise, combining audience and contextual, we have a very strong audience that can benefit all brands.”

Market normalising, competition global

In June, the 25-year-old brand said it would fully acquire US commercial truck and RVs listing business Trader Interactive, raising $1.2bn to buy the 51 per cent of the company it didn’t already own.

Locally, its car classified competition is also on the move – CarsGuide, along with Gumtree and Autotrader, were recently sold to ASX-listed The Market Herald, three years after Adevinta acquired them from eBay. Drive.com.au is owned by Nine, while CarExpert has also surged after launching in 2019.

“There are a number of players, but our position hasn’t changed for 15 years,” Vilusic said.

“To be honest, our competition is the global platform players. Our ambition is to compete on all categories, we don’t focus on our category…  Automotive markets are starting to come back to normality, post-Covid. We are seeing a definite strong movement in a positive direction from a category perspective, and we have a strong position in market.”