WELL-known auto website specialist, i-Motor, has formed a joint venture with West Australian-based advertising and marketing agency, The Marketing Mix (TMM), to provide a more complete service to dealers and OEMs requiring both advertising agency support as well as web services.

TMM is a full-service agency with the majority of its clients in the automotive industry, while i-Motor specialises in auto web and digital services. The new company will be rolled out nationally.

The managing director of TMM, Chris McCarthy, said in a statement: “Tony and I think we can be stronger together.”

The managing director of i-Motor, Tony Malby-Luke told GoAutoNews Premium that TMM, while based in the west, was gaining customers in Victoria and looking to expand further.

TMM’s WA customers include Mazda dealers and Subaru regional teams on behalf  of Subaru Australia across a number of states.

“TMM’s strength is their above-the-line advertising services. And from a dealer’s point of view they also have some other marketing strategies like car key recovery programmes and buyer referral rewards programs,” Mr Malby-Luke said.

“They have a cloud-based platform called ADit which allows their customers to keep track of all their advertising and media spend across all verticals for the year and see where they got value.

“TMM was doing dealer websites, but it is very hard to maintain websites and keep them up to date – especially with inventory. And that’s our speciality. We were doing a pitch for a large dealer group and I wanted to pitch with a holistic approach, not just: ‘We do this work but you have to do the other stuff yourself’.

“We did a couple of dealers as trials and it worked out really nicely for the dealerships because it’s a one-touch kind of relationship. Everything can be packaged and strategized by us.

“In some cases the dealers want to do things themselves like their social media. So, it’s like a smorgasbord. Just choose the bits you want to use.

“So that’s how it all came about.”

Mr Malby-Luke said that where TMM has clients which don’t have websites with them, TMM can approach them and solve their issues with i-Motor under the i-Auto Media brand.

“We can go back to all the i-Motor dealers and tell them about our division called i-Auto Media and if they have advertising requirements this is what we can do for them.”

Mr Malby-Luke said he and Mr McCarthy have known each other for many years.

“They are the kind of people you want to work with and so it felt like a natural fit when we started talking.”

By John Mellor