Inside job: How Carro's in-house marketing keeps its foot on the gas

For a business that’s barely a decade old, Carro doesn’t like to play the role of the bashful newcomer. Everything about Southeast Asia’s largest online used car platform screams disruption: it achieved market dominance in double quick time, gained unicorn status with a US$1 billion valuation within six years, and boasts, only half jokingly, of a ‘007’ always-on working culture in which sleeping is strictly optional.

Unsurprisingly, Carro’s marketing efforts don’t always play by the rules either. It walked away with six gongs at the 2024 YouTube Works Awards Southeast Asia for a creative approach that emphasises slick production and a sense of fun in a segment dominated by price-driven, cheap-and-cheerful advertising. It’s become nearly ubiquitous on social media at the same time. And it’s been a source of internal pride that its marketing is almost entirely executed in-house and has become increasingly less reliant on agencies over time.

With AI already powering its data-driven business model and promising a revolutionary level of customer insight, that looks like a prescient decision. It’s also part of a mindset that emphasises entrepreneurialism over perfection. Set up by three Singaporeans who were college classmates in the US with the aim of becoming the ‘Amazon of cars’, Carro is active in seven markets, including Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong and, most recently, Japan. Profits in 2024 exceeded SG$124 million, a 49% year-on-year increase. The business is so far ahead of the rest of the market – nearest rival Carsome has yet to turn a profit, and while Carousell has moved into cars, it’s playing catch-up – that its real challenger is customer stasis: getting the public to consider buying a used car online rather than following the tried-and-trusted pathway straight to a forecourt.

A reputation for customer service and professionalism is helping in that respect, but the quantum leap in performance has been led by marketing. Brand work has shifted from awareness to a more explanatory tone, emphasising the simplicity of the car-buying process, backed by targeted messaging, paid social and judicious use of digital content.

Why in-housing works for Carro

Carro’s latest campaign, ‘No Drama’, launched first in 2023 as a series of digital films that tapped into typical drama cliches to juxtapose the drama-free nature of buying a Carro Certified car. Revived in May 2025 (film below) with a fresh set of ads, it wowed YouTube judges and beat agency-created competition.

Keeping such high-end creative in-house – only video production was outsourced – is a badge of pride, says Carro’s regional marketing director Nicholas Leow. Planning, buying and brand work are also the responsibility of the internal team, and Carro’s rationale is based around responsiveness. “The biggest advantage is having a team with its undivided attention on the business,” says Leow. “The key thing is availability and being agile enough to react to change immediately. With an in-house team, we can make real-time decisions and execute them quickly.”

No Drama is an example of these principles in action. An agency might have wanted the campaign to be planned across more channels – Carro works primarily through YouTube and social media – and would probably have taken longer to bring it to market. Carro believes in-house offers less ‘hassle’ and means its brand, as a ‘mid-tier’ player, gets more attention than an agency could offer. But that brings its own challenges, particularly as AI changes the fundamentals of marketing in real time.

Getting to its current position has entailed marketing growing in scale and scope to match the business’s ambition, expanding on a hub-and-spoke basis to facilitate the move into new countries and new verticals: Carro now offers financing, after-sales and has moved into new car sales in Singapore and Malaysia.

Those shifts have been facilitated by a market-leading algorithm, influenced by game theory, that helps it set competitive prices and influences credit decisions. So it’s little surprise that a data-first mentality also extends to marketing. The four-strong performance marketing team has grown in importance over the past four years, since an internal restructure, and now controls data from right across the business.

The broad trend over those four years, according to regional performance marketing lead Aakash Kumar, has been a move away from bidding and targeting on platforms such as Google and Meta to working with first-party data, backed by a CRM that enables better audience segmentation. “Being that agile enables us to create faster, test faster and optimise the end business goals,” says Kumar. “It means when we’re investing in media, we know it’s generating the right sort of leads by focusing on the right products.”

The result is a two-way data flow whereby social platforms are integrated into the CRM to give sales teams detailed information about customer trends, while marketing colleagues get an insight into acquisition cost and real-time data on digital performance. One example of this deeper engagement in action, adds Kumar, is that 20% of views on the most recent No Drama ad were generated organically.

Next gear: AI, data and the road ahead

Data has taken on a new urgency under the leadership of chief marketing officer Katherine Teo, appointed in 2024, whose first year coincided with the mainstreaming of generative AI. Carro, fortunately, was ahead of the game: Kumar says the creative team has been ‘supercharged’ by using Google’s open source Copycat platform to produce campaigns at scale while adhering to existing brand guidelines. An in-house Python-proficient engineer is working within performance marketing to transform the use of SQL: the automation enabled by these efforts is helping the team think about how to use their time more productively and focus on strategy rather than execution. Kumar talks about tasks that required 8-9 hours of team members’ time now taking place in less than an hour.

“It’s shifting and changing at such a pace, and even when it comes to the use of AI in ads, we are still in an exploratory phase,” he says. “With AI, we’re continually looking not just at media metrics but at people metrics as well. How do we put the right infrastructure in place? We’re not there yet.”

AI, in fact, isn’t being used as widely in content generation and optimisation, particularly in non-English-speaking regions where its capabilities lag behind, says Kumar. But he sees greater potential for agentic AI to effectively execute decisions on behalf of marketers, calibrating campaigns and changing the channel mix as it receives new data, for example.

It’s clear, however, that the business sees limits to what AI can do: it isn’t currently using it for the execution of original creative. It pushes responsibility for how it is deployed to a more personal level, allowing marketers to focus on productivity gains that work for them rather than top-down initiatives.

However, the pressure to leverage the possibilities of new technology comes from the top. CEO Aaron Tan, one of the firm’s three co-founders, is keen on ‘failing fast’ and experimenting right across the board. He has placed data scientists into most teams and adds, “What you don’t want is a situation where you don’t try.”

Leow is more diplomatic. “The culture here is very focused on delivering business impact,” he says. “Every activity we do, we measure very carefully, and we test our decisions in real time. And being in-house enables our team members to have discussions with people from different backgrounds, understanding their needs, their challenges and leveraging them to push through the initiatives we need to give the best results.”

Carro’s vertically integrated model, in this reading, leaves it well positioned to ride out what the market throws at it next – and is entirely consistent with its growth to date. The business remains privately held and is rumoured to be working towards an IPO. But it’s also not an island – it’s notable that Leow, Kumar and Teo, alongside other team members, all have significant agency experience. As Leow puts it: “In-house has worked extremely effectively for us and we’ll be continuing down that road. But the landscape is evolving so fast, and we have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis. If we don’t have a particular expertise in our team and it doesn’t make sense to bring it in-house, we’re definitely open to working with external agencies.”

And just recently, Carro crossed the final frontier when it released its first-ever internally produced video campaign (film above). Launched for the Japanese market and branded Ikigai (‘purpose’ or ‘reason ’), it followed the story of a customer, Ryusei Sasaki, who travelled 1,000km across the country to buy the car of his dreams. As it turned out, Sasaki didn’t just get new wheels: he was so enamoured with Carro that he ended up taking a job with them. It’s an expensive and laborious way to find new talent, but it’s very much in keeping with a brand that goes the extra mile.