Carsales’ main media push shows where the classified players can go next
Welcome to a midweek edition of Unmade.
Today: Carsales deals itself into the data game, and continuing decline on the Unmade Index.
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Upfronts for everyone, including classified players
We hit the peak day of Australia’s upfronts season yesterday.
While Mamamia and Amazon’s Prime Video went head-to-head in Sydney last night, I was in Melbourne for Carsales Open House.
(A declaration of interest before you read on: Carsales paid for my flights.)
It’s the first time I can recall three upfronts events taking place in Australia on the same day. For those who’ve not been in the industry for very long, it wasn’t always like this. For decades, the only people who ran upfronts were the TV networks. Now, canape-loving marketers can bank on several weeks of hospitality to kick off the final quarter.
The upfronts originated from the annualised deals between the networks and the media agencies, and the need to showcase content for the year ahead.
But gradually, upfronts have become more of a moment to simply promote the company’s media product. Nine took that to a counter intuitive level at its upfronts event last month, declining to even share its programming grid for the following year, arguing that telling its advertisers when they plan to run shows is now an old fashioned approach.
Prior to the pandemic, the bigger, non-TV players like News Corp had begun to recognise the opportunity of focusing marketers’ minds by running its own upfront equivalent in Come Together. During the pandemic this became Decoded, as a virtual event which this year became in-person again.
And smaller players like Junkee Media also found their own way in by conducting an annual piece of research offering insights into the youth sector as its way of focusing marketing minds.
This year, there’s been an explosion of upfront events. Later this month, as well as the TV players of Foxtel and Seven West Media, we’ll also hear from outdoor company Ooh Media. Last month, the Digital Publishers Alliance ran its first Independents Day as an impressive addition to the calendar.
Given the momentum, next year, I doubt there’ll be a single big media player that fails to do something without good reason.
Yesterday’s Carsales event though was the first time I can recall what is effectively a classifieds brand getting in on the upfronts action. The classified players are now coming after the display advertising money – they’ve been wanting to for a while, but are getting better at it.
I recently wrote about how the The Market Herald – which last week completed its acquisition of Carsguide, Autotrader and Gumtree – plans to target upmarket lifestyle advertising with its push into print. I understand that job site Seek is also developing strategies for capturing new media revenues beyond recruitment ads.
This all represents a fresh wave in the rise of the classified players. Having diverted the flow of the classified rivers of gold 15 years ago, they are now looking for new places to find growth. One of them is in becoming media players in their own right. If Antony Catalano hadn’t been ousted from real estate platform Domain back in 2018, it would have already happened there.
Automotive is one of the most hotly contested classified verticals, with Carsales, Carsguide and Nine’s Drive in a three-way fight, with the privately owned CarExpert looking to break in as a fourth player.
The idea of taking a bigger slice of the media market is not a new one. Carsales took its media in-house all the way back in 2009, creating a team called MediaMotive.
It also attempted a new approach when it hired Dentsu boss Simon Ryan as its MD of commercial at the end of 2018, with a brief to boost the company’s media revenue line. Ryan was in there such a short time – less than a year – that his sojourn at Carsales no longer even appears on his LinkedIn profile.
In the years since, MediaMotive has become Carsales Media House, led by commercial directors Vanya Mariani and Davor Vilusic
The company’s annual report suggests it’s made progress since Ryan’s departure, with media revenue growing to $54.5m, a growth of 15% in the year just gone. An organisation recording that sort of annualised media revenue deserves to be taken seriously as a media company in its own right.
Much of this growth has come from diversifying beyond automotive brands for the types of advertising clients targeted. Think finance and insurance – still relevant in the context of the audience.
Still, in the scheme of the company’s advertising revenue lines, media is relatively small. Dealer advertising accounts for $307.7m and private advertising $69.4m. So media is about 18% of that.
The announcements at yesterday’s event were designed to grow that percentage.
They were the kind of announcements you’d expect to hear at an upfront from a more mainstream media company – a data partnership with Adobe; a client self-service platform branded as Ignition, and a client briefs team under the Fuse brand.
It was an attempt to lean into the prevailing wind of the evolution from third party to first party data. The Adobe partnership will see the company offer Carsales Match as a means of pooling customer profiles with clients and generating lookalike audiences.
Although the company was not saying it, in theory its large data pool – it claims almost 11m members – would be large enough to offer reach to any type of brand that isn’t too fussy about the automotive context.
We may be hitting a point where classified players are beginning to hit ceiling of geographic growth within their verticals. So now they need to widen their footprints instead. Within those verticals, it signals a kind of rebundling. They’re coming for the full marketing funnels.
Carsales won’t be the last
The Unmade Index: Back down again
Most of the Unmade Index’s big gains of last week have been lost again as listed media and marketing companies saw a fourth day in a row of declining capitalisations.
On Tuesday, The Index fell by 1.48%.
The biggest fall in value was for Southern Cross Austereo which lost 4.71% yesterday, and is once again hovering close to its lowest value in is history. Manwhile, Domain fell back below a $2bn market cap.
Time to let you get on with your day.
I’ll be back tomorrow with a podcast interview with startup founder Alex Pan, the person behind intriguing new platform Storipress. It’s a really good conversation.
Have a good day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
tim@unmade.media
