New Digital Age (NDA) in association with LiveRamp is spotlighting the men and women championing a data-led revolution in the marketing industry. ‘Meet the Revolutionaries’ focuses on the efforts of the industry executives helping to push digital marketing into a new era of data collaboration.
Chris Ashton-Green is CEO and Founder of Regit.cars, a free ‘digital garage’ where UK car owners can buy, sell and maintain their vehicles. Here, Ashton-Green explains how he used data to create a new automotive advertising product in collaboration with Sky Media…
Tell me about your role
As CEO and founder of a scale-up business, I need to be the visionary, to an extent, in terms of the ideas, the innovation, the strategy, and more importantly, how we go to market and execute those ideas. As a business, we’re more than a decade old and generating multi-million pound revenues, so when we talk of ‘scaling up’, we’re talking about building the brand and scaling our data.
I need to wear a few different hats, including sales, marketing, finance and strategy, but I have an excellent and very skilled team around me that I can rely on to deliver what we need every day.
Can you give an example of a time when you personally helped to drive innovation?
One game-changing innovation for us came about partially as a result of the COVID pandemic. That was a painful time for us, as it was for so many businesses. We were simultaneously in survival mode and innovation mode. We asked ourselves, what does the future look like for us when we get through this?
One night during the pandemic, I was watching Sky TV and learned about their Ad Smart product, which allows Sky to personalise the ads served to be more relevant to viewers based on who they are, where they live and what they watch.
At Regit, we have around 4 million vehicle data records as well as consumer records. We have the person, we have the vehicle that they own, and we understand where they are in that car-owning life cycle. I had that idea that, if we could attach our vehicle data to Sky’s home data in a compliant and anonymised fashion, we could go to market with a new and much more targeted TV advertising product for car manufacturers and the auto industry as a whole.
I pitched the idea to Kevin Brown, co-founder of Electric Glue and a non executive director of ours, who has great contacts within Sky. We took the idea to them, presented it, and they absolutely loved it. We did all the necessary due diligence with Sky in terms of matching our data sets. The minimum match they wanted was half a million homes. We matched a couple of million vehicles to their subscribers’ homes.
That led us into a new strategic partnership with Sky, where, between the two businesses, we were able to launch a new addressable TV product in automotive. It took around two years to do the deal, and we’ve just finished our first year. We’re Sky’s most successful data partner to date and the plan now is for Sky to help us build our brand and scale our data aggressively so that the partnership goes from strength to strength.
What are the most common challenges to innovation?
That’s a fairly easy one to answer. Innovation is all about ideas. It’s about creativity. It’s about coming up with something that you can get your team to buy into and more importantly utilising them to help you shape it.
Sometimes, they might not necessarily agree with you. I operate a culture where we have a ‘speak freely’ attitude. Everybody’s got a voice and we tend to take votes in terms of whether we proceed with an idea or not. They’ve outvoted me on a couple of occasions, and I’ve had to take it on the chin.
Sometimes, as a CEO and founder, you might have to push something forward, but generally speaking you need buy-in from your team to make things work. Innovation is useless without execution.
Perseverance and patience are also important. As a sales oriented guy, I’m not the most patient person in the world. Innovation can take time, no matter how good the idea may be, so you need to deal with that challenge.
What tips can you offer others hoping to drive innovation?
We see a lot of tech businesses out there who invest a lot of money in creating a good product but then fail to deploy it properly. Building a product is one thing, executing it is another. Prior to the Sky deal, we’d been launching small products in data testing, looking at how we monetise data through our car manufacturer partners and our ad agency partners. For me, it makes sense to create a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) that allows you to prove your concept.
Set a budget and time aside for innovation. If we decide we want to do something new for our consumers, we tend to ask them ‘what do you think of this?’ Research, analysis, surveys, customer focus groups are things you should absolutely lean on.
How do you think digital marketing might evolve over the next few years?
In the automotive space, we’ve seen marketing evolve a lot over the years. During COVID, we saw total online car buying emerge. We saw dealers putting all the processes, the tools, the technology, in place where, effectively, they could sell cars online without ever having to see a customer face-to-face. That’s still a relatively small part of what dealers and car manufacturers do, but it’s still a significant change.
The emergence of AI is a big talking point at this moment in time. We should never underestimate the power of data, especially in combination with AI. Every business has data, but what can they do with it? Is it compliant? Can they deploy it? Can they turn it into a product? Can they monetise it? I think AI is going to help with all of that.
Marketing is about people and creativity. If you put those two in the mix with data and AI, that, for me, would be the perfect recipe.
Do you think ‘data collaboration’ will become more important to marketers?
Through our data collaboration partnership with Sky, we’ve been able to launch a product that, over the last 12 months, has generated multi-million pound revenues for them and a substantial amount of commission for us. I’ve looked at other areas where we can operate in terms of data collaboration. If we’ve done it with TV, we can do it probably in other areas, mobile and social for instance. We’re working with companies like Bliss and LiveRamp to explore those opportunities. Ultimately we hope to create and launch similar data collaborative partnerships in relation to the above as well as in music/radio and outdoor. These then will all sit comfortably alongside our current data partnership with Sky.
