With the Spring’s new car model launches fast approaching, Ozone Agency Sales Director Jacque Chadwick takes a closer look at our automotive insights
With the Spring’s new car model launches hurtling towards us like the SSC Tuatara flying down Route 160 in Nevada at top speed (that’s the world’s fastest production car setting its world-record breaking top speed of 316.11mph in North America, btw), I’ve taken a look under the bonnet at some of our automotive insights.
Having taken a year-long view of reader engagement with automotive editorial across Ozone’s portfolio, we can see this content performed particularly strongly in the second half of 2020 despite the industry-wide impact of the pandemic and lockdown in the first half of the year.
In H2, there were an average of 5.6 million automotive page views a week, up +92% on the first six months, with much of this growth coming in the final quarter of the year. Q4 saw average weekly automotive page views double compared to the previous quarter. And this positive trend is continuing in 2021 as weekly average page views for January grew +29% versus December 2020.
Within subtopics of the automotive category, and in a sign of an increasing appetite for consumers to spend their savings on new car purchases, we saw an increase in the consumption of ‘automotive buying and selling’ content, which more than tripled in Q4 compared to Q3 2020.
Digging a little deeper, while the tone of our automotive content is evenly balanced, articles about buying and selling cars, new on-board technology and electric vehicles skew toward positive sentiment.
Like most industries, the Covid-19 pandemic impact on the automotive industry has been significant, with lockdown diminishing consumer demand for big ticket items like car purchases, which in turn fuelled a drop off in car production. Added to this, 2020 saw the UK Government announce a new and ambitious policy to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars in the country by 2030 in a zero emissions bid.
Despite all this we have seen a positive reaction from both car brands and UK consumers, as the industry looks set to bounce back - a bounce back being propelled by greener engine options, smarter tech and new ecommerce propositions; all of which is expected to be unlocked by a £125 billion stockpile of consumer savings built up over the course of the pandemic.
Among the automotive trends in 2021, electric vehicles are a continuing hot topic for the sector, with Elon Musk’s Tesla stealing global headlines, a plethora of EV models from the biggest car brands set to launch this year and the recent announcements that Jaguar and Ford cars will be all-electric by 2025 and 2030 respectively.
And the innovation in the technology that powers our cars, is mirrored by innovation in on-board tech, including wi-fi connectivity and device compatibility, and the ways in which we buy them, as car brands overhaul their ecommerce propositions to bring us new digital showrooms and click-and-collect or home delivery services.
As the UK’s leading high attention digital advertising platform, Ozone connects auto brands to highly trusted, editorially-governed, premium content at scale - and automotive content is one of the most engaged with content categories across our platform.
Ozone is perfectly positioned to reach car consumers at broadcast scale. Not only do we reach 99% of the UK’s online adults, we also have a depth of car content published across our premium publisher websites that reaches 86%3 of the nation’s car fans a month, latest PAMCo data shows. Furthermore, over half of our daily audience of car fans (52%) say they plan to buy a new car in the next six months.
We also see a significantly high audience crossover between Ozone’s portfolio and the UK’s leading automotive information and car brand websites, as evidenced by Comscore’s measure of monthly unique visitors. On average, more than three-quarters of monthly visitors to both the top-five automotive information and the top five car brand websites visit Ozone websites every single month.
Ozone’s unique single view of reading behaviour from our frequently returning visitors across our titles means we can build in-market segments that fuel both brand and performance campaigns to drive brand health, as well as website visits, brochure downloads and test-drive bookings. Our trusted car content and the automotive advertising campaigns viewed on our platform can inform, inspire and influence consumer car research through to purchasing decisions.
As the automotive market continues to rev its engine in 2021, the Ozone portfolio provides both contextually relevant and insightfully rich ways of reaching would-be car buyers. Give the team 'a toot' if you'd like to hear more.
* Car Fans = PAMCo readership with an interest in cars/motors topic
