Carousell brings it brands under Carousell Media Group umbrella

“This makes the Carousell Media Group uniquely positioned to help brands connect with and better understand the buying habits and attitudes of this highly sought-after consumer segment.”

Brands that will sit under the umbrella include Carousell, Mudah.my, Cho Tot and OneKyat, with the group operating across Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Why it matters?

• Advertising is currently one of Carousell’s main revenue streams, with the platform operating on a largely ad-dependent model.

• It has built targeting models that predict propensity to purchase, which allows advertisers to choose from a variety of campaign strategies. Its internal advertising platform allows advertisers to optimize their campaigns on reach for optimal brand awareness campaigns, or on the propensity to purchase for optimal conversion campaigns.

• The platform’s inventory was previously available to media buyers on the Singapore Media Exchange (SMX), offering programmatic brand-safe options to reach top-quality audiences across South East Asia, including exclusive access to premium formats.

• When it was on SMX, Carousell could combine its own first-party data with other marketplaces in the co-op, including Kaidee and Mudah, to create richer audience data for more precise and effective targeting for advertisers.

• At the same time, the platform has an ongoing battle with fraud, which it described as “like an arms race” and a threat to its ad revenue because scammers innovate as quickly as the platform does.

• Carousell battled mispriced listings by opportunistic individuals who wanted to use the Covid-19 crisis to profit from masks and sanitizers when the outbreak first peaked in many countries in early February, by taking the unprecedented decision to moderate listings based on prices set by the government (where available), or an internally developed benchmark (in countries where the government does not set the price).

• It also noticed new suspicious activities as panic-buying became rampant, discovering that scammers quickly put up listings on the marketplace without the real intention of fulfilling buyers’ orders.

• The platform had to activate its teams to scan the marketplace frequently and stepped up on the review rate of flags its community of users sends to the platform so that it could act on bad actors and fraudulent listings with little delay. Carousell also configured its internal keyword detection tool to trigger a safety tip message to the users when it detects potential suspicious activity with chatbots.