How carsales mediahouse is using AI to uncover hidden customer intent and drive smarter advertising
07-08-2025
In today’s fragmented digital landscape, understanding the customer journey is more complex – and more critical — than ever. For carsales mediahouse, the media division of Australia’s leading digital auto marketplace, carsales, the challenge has become an opportunity to innovate.
By combining its rich first-party data with Adobe’s advanced AI technology, carsales mediahouse is redefining how advertisers connect with car buyers. Early results are already turning heads, including a 20%1 improvement in defining consumer purchase intent.
Rethinking the road to purchase
Buying a car isn’t always a linear journey. In fact, carsales’ Journey to Vehicle Ownership research reveals that almost half of Australian consumers (46%) pause or reverse their decisions during the process.
Recognising this non-linear behaviour, carsales mediahouse turned to Customer AI, an embedded AI feature in Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform to better understand where shoppers are in their vehicle buying journey. Customer AI analyses all user interactions within the carsales ecosystem, including real-time behavioural signals across, to predict outcomes such as the likelihood of consumers submitting an enquiry. This aims to provide advertisers with a clearer view of consumers’ intent and the factors influencing it, enabling more precise audience segmentation and smarter campaign targeting.
Adobe’s Ultimate Success team helped equip carsales with the training, coaching and strategic guidance needed to activate Customer AI across its media and marketing practices.
“At carsales, our first-party data is our greatest asset — it’s what sets us apart,” says Stephen Kyefulumya, General Manager of Media – Product and Technology at carsales. “By integrating Adobe’s Customer AI, we’re able to enrich that data even further. The combination gives advertisers more precision, more relevant audience segmentation, and ultimately, can help to deliver a better return on investment.”
Surfacing hidden demand
Since adopting Customer AI, carsales mediahouse has seen significant improvements in both the size and quality of its addressable audience2.
“Many buyers may not seem ready to purchase based on surface-level actions, but when you look deeper — at all the touchpoints in their journey — their intent becomes much clearer,” says Kyefulumya. “That’s where Customer AI is proving really valuable.
“Our previous segmentation method indicated that about 65% of consumers were in the early stages of their buying journey and 28% had medium intent to submit an enquiry3. Customer AI has shown nearly the opposite is true4, and our early marketing activations and testing back that up.”
These AI-powered insights enabled carsales to identify high-intent buyers who were likely to take action within a four-week window. Targeted outreach to this audience, including email and push notifications, led to a 23% increase in push notification engagement compared to similar activity nine months earlier5.
A smarter future for automotive advertising
For Adobe, the partnership with carsales is a powerful example of how brands can unlock the full value of their data with AI.
Using AI and the power of first-party data to better match sellers’ propositions with customer demands has two-sided benefits. It’s helped carsales unearth latent demand and reach a larger audience in more advanced stages of purchasing.
As part of its broader innovation strategy, carsales continues to explore AI-powered technologies to enhance user experiences and help advertisers reach real, ready-to-buy audiences.
To learn more about how Adobe is helping brands like carsales transform customer intelligence into action, read about Adobe Real-Time CDP.
1 carsales mediahouse internal data, based on 8 weeks Customer AI propensity model segments, 2024
2 carsales mediahouse internal data, based on 8 weeks Customer AI propensity model segments, 2024
3 carsales mediahouse internal data, based on traditional Buying Journey Segmentation, 2024
4 carsales mediahouse internal data, based on 8 weeks Customer AI propensity model segments, 2024
5 carsales mediahouse case study, Activating the new Adobe RT-CDP Customer AI Audiences via SFMC, 2024
Gabbi Stubbs is the APAC product marketing lead for Audience Manager, Adobe’s data management platform. She is a full-stack and foresight strategist with senior experience in media, technology, innovation and transformation, and digital enablement.
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