Singapore – Carousell Media Group, the advertising arm of Carousell Group, which holds recommerce platforms or marketplaces for pre-loved items such as Carousell, Mudah.my, ChoTot, OneKyat and Ox Street, has launched a first-of-its-kind recommerce programmatic buying platform.
Called ‘Connect’, the tech is launched via the group’s advertising arm Carousell Media. The platform will deploy DSP ad technology and will be powered by the buying, selling, and search data signals generated from Carousell Media Group’s wide monthly user count across Greater Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
JJ Eastwood, managing director of Carousell Media Group, shared that the Connect platform was launched to allow brands to reach buyers and sellers both on and off Carousell’s marketplaces since “inspiration, discovery, and purchase can happen anywhere.”
“We have witnessed unprecedented growth in recommerce over the last 12 months, that’s being propelled by consumer demand for sustainability as well as e-commerce, and it’s quickly becoming an important component of the consumer-brand relationship,” said Eastwood.
The group said the Connect platform will give advertisers a viable alternative to the closed environments like Google and Facebook, by providing them with full-funnel marketing solutions and enabling them to engage with Carousell Media Group’s audiences on every ad format, such as video, display, audio, and Connected TV. Furthermore, Carousell Media Group says that the integration of first-party and third-party data sets is what sets the Connect offering apart from others.
The platform was initially offered to selected advertisers, with Decathlon being a prominent one. The parent group said that as part of 2022’s rollout under Connect, its ad arm will be launching new ad products, such as Carousell Search Ads which will enable advertisers to fully leverage real-time keyword searches.
As a parent company to classifieds platforms, Carousell Group has been shaping its capabilities to help entities in its advertising efforts. In November 2021, it launched for the second time its ‘Free Ads for Charities’ initiative, an advertising support program for non-profit organizations (NPOs) in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.