Raycom Media Sees Its Auto Future In PureCars.com

With their investments in websites aimed at people looking to buy cars, broadcasters Cox Media (KKB.com and autotrader.com) and Tegna Media (Cars.com) have been able to grab some of the auto marketing dollars that have been flowing to digital.

Another broadcaster, Raycom Media, is hoping to do the same, but with a slightly different approach. Rather than a consumer-facing auto website, last fall it purchased PureCars.com, a supplier to consumer data to sellers of cars.

“Probably since the Recession, we’ve seen [the spot auto] category not grow dramatically. And over the last two years — particularly in the last three or four quarters — the category eroded a bit,” says Raycom CEO Paul McTear.

“We don’t believe long-term we’ll be able to dramatically affect [the spot ad revenue trend]. We really had to go and buy a business and, in my words, bolt it onto Raycom Media.”

Joe Fiveash, VP of digital strategy and business development at Raycom, describes PureCars’ business as “creating data products that enable dealers to better sell cars on their website, or other sites like Cars.com.”

PureCars uses search engine marketing to determine which cars on a dealer’s lot should be marketed online and the ideal price that will assure they’re going to be sold, he says.

PureCars also offers car companies a programmatic ad buying service for buying digital advertising.

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Jeremy Anspach, has big plans. “One of the things we’re going to be working on over the next few years is bringing down the divide between TV and digital.”

Exactly what that means is to be determined, but Anspach notes that there’s hardly any connectivity between spots on TV and the process consumers engage in online as they search for cars.