Turn around these days and you’ll bump into a retail media network (RMN). In the bustling commerce media space, companies from Lowe’s to Nordstrom to 7-Eleven have developed their own RMNs.
Last month, Cars.com – a 25-year-old Chicago-based automotive company that started out in the digital newspaper ads business – entered the RMN fray. Called the Cars Commerce Media Network, the Cars.com RMN launched in conjunction with a larger rebrand around Cars Commerce, an enterprise platform that pulls together the company’s media products.
Most of the RMN buzz to date has centered on CPG advertisers and mass retailers, according to Cars Commerce CMO Jennifer Vianello. The RMN is built specifically for automotive advertisers, compiling audiences from Cars.com and dealership websites alongside advertising inventory on and off Cars.com.
The company works with 19,000 dealerships, but its clients also include automakers, major auto groups like AutoNation and Penske, and finance and insurance companies like Geico and State Farm.
Vianello declined to disclose specific clients that use its ad business so far.
Setting the stage
The debut of Cars.com’s commerce platform and RMN has been a long time coming. It was, according to Vianello, “to some extent, always a retail media network for automotive.”
A burst of acquisitions over the past few years reflects the online car marketplace’s increasing focus on retail tech and retail media. For instance, Cars.com acquired auto financing company CreditIQ in 2021, trading technology company Accu-Trade in 2022 and Canadian automotive tech company D2C Media early this month.
Cars Commerce is looking to support car dealers and automakers that are experiencing “the craziness of the COVID years coming back to earth,” Vianello said. Used cars are still in short supply. Customers who may have been off the market for several years because of car shortages are balking at higher car prices and interest rates – while also showing some curiosity about electric vehicles.
Auto edge
A big part of that support comes from the first-party data Cars.com is sitting on. The website gets 25 million to 30 million unique visitors a month.
The company takes that data and builds a deterministic audience of people actively searching for a car in the next three to six months, Vianello said. The company uses its CDP and connected ad tech components to create audience segments across channels.
For instance, advertisers can see that consumers shopping for a Ford F150 are 20% more likely to search for certain other makes and models.
Advertisers can also measure how consumers “adjusted their shopping behavior after being exposed to the advertising” during a particular period of time, Vianello said. She noted that one automaker saw a 12% lift in the interactions consumers had with a local dealership website after consumers viewed its advertising.
Cars Commerce’s media offerings include programmatic video, display and shoppable media products for both local and national advertisers.
Don’t panic
Reaching in-market consumers has always been a complex undertaking for automotive advertisers, according to Vianello. People buy a car every five to seven years – or more – and can take months to decide which model. Consumers conduct extensive research and change their mind throughout the shopping process.
“It’s not [like] the same person who needs to buy diapers every single month,” she said.
And targeting consumers is about to get harder once cookie deprecation takes effect in June 2024.
Although Cars.com still uses third-party cookies, Vianello isn’t worried. On mobile, the majority of the brand’s app traffic comes from Apple, which deprecated cookies years ago.
“It’s a deadline,” she said, “for getting us to earn a consumer’s desire to share their information with us and become part of our email pool, for example.”
