Auto Trader has signed with Wave2 to use its AdPortal system in South Africa, extending a five-year relationship.
The UK developer says its self-service advertising solution is already being used by more than 300 motor and truck dealers.
The same system – then known as Mag Ad Manager throughout the European dealer community – has been used in the UK and Ireland since 2009.
Automated software provides a publisher with a fully integrated and enhanced solution for its motor and truck dealers, with the software helping to define ad content before automatically creating the layout.
Managing director Chris Hodges says an issue was that motor and truck dealers were used to a very personal level of service: “A sales person would help to compile a new advert for the customer for every edition of the publication, with ad content likely to change up to the very last minute. Our software needs to mimic this high level of customer service while reducing the costs of creating an ad.”
At Auto Trader South Africa the system integrates with the central stock database which houses the details of vehicles supplied by the dealer for online promotion. Based on a set of pre-agreed ad building rules, it automatically decides which vehicles are most appropriate to be included in the advert and extracts details of each along with an image if available.
“The software then sorts the basic vehicle descriptions via a number of elements that it expects to find – the make, model, age or price for example – and automatically creates the ad according to the individual motor dealer’s preferences,” he says.
An email of the ad is automatically sent to the dealer, with the option to make manual changes if required, and if none are received it is deemed acceptable.
“This is one of the most sophisticated systems that we have developed to date,” says Hodges. “In the Auto Trader system our rules structure is actually helping to determine what the content is before we fit that content into the predefined space.”
• Wave2 have introduced a software-as-a-service version of its self‐service advertising solution, AdPortal Cloud. The company says the pre‐configured, hosted service is delivered in packaged form and operated as a service.
“The new version of AdPortal is designed to be implemented and live in less than four weeks, with pre‐configured categories, classifications, workflows and templates easing the set‐up burden,” says sales director Andrew Haggarty.