2023 was one of the most challenging years on record for the automotive industry - still in recovery mode from the array of challenges it has seen with COVID, chip shortages, EV legislation changes, and everything else in between. Full order books and limited stock meant car brands often had little need to advertise. To address these challenges, it was essential to clearly demonstrate to advertisers the negative impact of reducing their ad spend and to create strategic and innovative solutions that would help them meet their goals. Alongside this, it was an urgent imperative to diversifying client engagement beyond core business and to activate a wider range of advertisers to achieve annual growth targets.

Peter Jones aimed to reassess car brands' short-term objectives, boost revenue diversification, and attract new advertisers, setting the foundation for future revenue growth in years to come. Creative an strategic in his approach, he ensured his solutions met each client’s specific requirements, and this innovation was key to achieving growth across a range of clients and sectors.

After receiving targets for the year, Pete was quick to plan his accounts and understand where he would need to pick up additional revenue from existing and new clients, showing maturity and strategic thinking. Pete used data-led insight to demonstrate how continuing to advertise would shape customer choice over a longer period of time. He even used his knowledge of future industry legislation (ZEV mandate) to demonstrate the importance of advertising

for each client's longer term business objectives.

Stellantis had long been a challenging client, but here Pete pitched new innovative content led formats to address their challenges, which eventually led to additional display, lead generation, partnerships and bespoke placements, to become a regular partner on plans. Another great example is Pete seeing Toyota running Motability campaigns on competitor content - He collaborated with Autovia editors to create a new section on Auto Express, winning incremental business.

Pete targeted new business from non-core clients - building brand new relationships and winning a solus £150k Shell content partnership to reach premium fuel users! Pete sold exclusive activity for Toyota sub-brand, Kinto, targeting fleet buyers. He delivered customer leads directly to Kinto, advising their CRM team on call scripts post-lead generation—a pioneering approach.

Across his patch, where he booked £1.5m of business, over £800k was from new revenue streams the advertiser hadn't booked before. These revenue streams were highly diverse, and included programmatic display, lead generation, high impact print, video, and multi platform content partnerships, proving not only Pete's deep understanding of various digital media solutions, but also a dynamic and forward thinking approach to truly influence his clients investment decisions.

Pete was also responsible for booking 58% of total revenue taken from new advertisers from across the Autovia sales team, showing his tenacity and unwillingness to rely on existing business. This included winning a brand-new cross media partnership from Shell, a standout campaign that included multiple executions and was fully incremental revenue.

All of this led to personnel revenue growth of 60% Year on Year, a fantastic and standout achievement in a remarkably tough automotive market. Pete knows the agency landscape inside out and is a huge credit to the Autovia Sales team and media industry as a whole.

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