The vehicle database and the advertising business (2014–present)
The problem as it actually was
When I joined the Company in late 2013 as project manager for the classifieds site, the classifieds business had no clear commercial future. Mudah.my held the free-listings market, and Carlist.my had external funding from Carsales Australia and the marketing budget to match. Fighting that battle directly meant losing it slowly. Meanwhile, the Company's advertising business - the publisher revenue across the flagship publication - was being handled by a third-party agency (the incumbent ad agency), with all the dependency that arrangement implies.
The architectural read - the product side
Rather than play catch-up against entrenched market leaders, I proposed a category Malaysia didn't yet have online: a structured car buyer's guide. The vehicle-database platform was built on a proper taxonomy - body type, segment, A/B/C/D classification - that didn't exist anywhere else in the Malaysian automotive online market at the time. The classification logic was codified internally before launch.
The architectural read - the advertising side
When the vehicle-database platform went live, a founding director set up Google Ad Manager (then Doubleclick for Publishers), built the initial ad slots, and handed the operations to me. I had no prior experience with digital advertising. Harvinder introduced me to a global media agency, who handled the Honda account, and a global media agency became my trial by fire - I learned ad pricing, sales mechanics (CPM, placements), quotations, inventory orders, booking orders, traffic, creative setup, and campaign management end to end, running sales and operations simultaneously.
After a year, the conclusion was clear: we could run this ourselves. The Company's contract with the incumbent ad agency was ending. We took the ad sales and operations back in-house.
What was built
The flagship publication was the harder problem. It was an ongoing publication of articles with no structural metadata to target against - the opposite of the vehicle-database platform's clean taxonomy. The conventional fix would have been to retroactively tag every article. I chose contextual targeting on the URL slug instead - extracting keywords from the post URL and applying Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT) to construct targetable audiences without ever touching the article content. That decision is still how the flagship publication's contextual advertising runs today.
I then rebuilt the pricing and packaging:
- Replaced single-unit sales with packages - for example, the Contextual ROS package combines billboard, half-page, and MREC creative across desktop and mobile, with Google Ad Manager optimising which serves more based on performance.
- Applied frequency caps (3–5 impressions per user per day) to reduce ad blindness - protecting client performance rather than maximising delivery.
- Stopped selling SOV (share of voice).
- Refused to sell 100% SOV deals - they cost the client a lot and rarely justified the price in performance terms. Performance was what brought clients back.
- Retired the standard leaderboard (ignored by users) and replaced the MREC with a custom 360×300 XLREC sized for increasingly large mobile screens.
- Advised, not just transacted. When clients asked for "homepage," I'd propose contextual ROS if their objective was tactical conversion. I'd flag creative errors, animation issues, or formats unlikely to perform. This earned a reputation for constructive feedback that clients valued - and brought renewals.
Around 2018 I took over all pricing, discount, package, and product-naming decisions. From 2021 I began codifying the policies, guidelines, and terms - the same governance instruments now used across the publisher business.
Outcome
The advertising business is now a multi-million-ringgit annual book that funds the rest of the Company, run on packaging, pricing, and policy architecture I designed and codified from a zero-experience start. The flagship publication reaches 4–5 million unique users monthly. The contextual-targeting decision I made in 2015 still defines how the inventory is sold today.
What this shows
Walking into a domain with zero prior experience and ending up authoring the system that runs the business. The same pattern that recurs everywhere in this CV - self-taught, codified into reusable instruments, taught to a team, surviving the author.