Motorway launches new ad campaign

Real Motorway customer stories brought to life in latest campaign from the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace

Friday, 12th January 2024: Motorway, the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace, has launched a new campaign featuring true Motorway stories, highlighting the key customer benefit of selling a car for more money. 

Motorway connects car owners directly with their network of more than 5,000 car dealers. These verified dealers compete to buy each car in an online daily sale, allowing the seller to get more money in the process. For sellers, profiling and selling their car is a 100% online process, with their car collected from home for free. As a result, they get more money and a convenient selling process.

To bring this to life, Motorway’s new campaign features true car selling stories, with the first of two new ads featuring Jen’s story. The TV spot opens with Jen working from home, when her husband video calls to speak with Jen and their daughter. We see the daughter run through her tired and tattered bedroom, to speak to her father on screen. Jen’s husband works away from home, so they decide they no longer need two cars. Jen chooses to sell one of the cars on Motorway, which she’s able to do quickly and easily, all from her phone. When the offer comes through, Jen is shocked and delighted, as she received more money than she expected. Once the finance is paid off, Jen uses the remaining money to surprise her daughter with the bedroom of her dreams, resulting in a win for everyone in the family. 

In the second spot, we meet Ian, as he’s called into his manager’s office. After 35 years, he’s been made redundant and finds himself at a crossroads. Whilst considering his next career move, Ian hears a Motorway ad on the radio. After some time, he decides to sell his car on Motorway and is surprised to see the winning bid is far more than he was expecting. Ian uses the money from the sale of his car to buy a van and the tools, to finally take a leap of faith and become his own boss. We see Ian become a sole trader, fulfilling a lifelong goal. 

This new campaign builds on Motorway’s previous ‘Dealers Compete’ campaign, which drove understanding and awareness of Motorway’s unique proposition. With significant brand awareness in market, Motorway is now evolving this platform to focus on the customer benefit of getting more money.

In addition to the TVCs, Motorway’s through-the-line campaign includes radio, social and OOH. The campaign was created by Motorway’s in-house brand marketing team, produced by RSA films, directed by Stuart Rideout, with media planning and buying handled by MG OMD. Simon Morris, formerly the Chief Creative Officer of Amazon, was the Executive Creative Director for the campaign. 

Rachael Halliday, Brand Marketing Director at Motorway, said:

“Our research shows that for the majority of car sellers, getting the best price is their number one priority when choosing where and how to sell. Motorway’s nationwide network of dealers compete to give their best price, and as a result car sellers are surprised and delighted by getting more money than they expected. While selling a car can be a very transactional experience, the stories behind the wheel are incredibly relatable and moving – cars are a huge part of our lifestyles and finances. With so many of our sellers sharing their positive experiences with us, we knew we had to give these success stories a platform to help other car owners get more money too. 

“We’re confident this high-reach campaign will drive greater awareness, and connect with an even wider audience at a time when getting more money is more pertinent than ever. We feel this new campaign will really engage with car owners on a personal level, bringing the Motorway way to sell your car, to life in a more emotional and benefit-led way.”

Watch the new advert on YouTube here: Ian’s Story and Jen’s Story

ENDS

About Motorway

Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace. We connect people selling their car directly with our network of more than 5,000 verified car dealers, matching each seller on our platform with the dealer who most wants to buy their car. We help car owners sell their cars 100% online for a great price in as little as 24 hours, with their car collected from home for free, while supporting our car dealer partners to easily acquire the best used car stock.

Gender pay gap

In 2023, Motorway continued to help thousands of UK car owners to sell their vehicles, quickly, easily and for a great price whilst supporting our network of more than 5,000 dealers to acquire premium, used-car stock.

At the same time, we have continued to focus on cultivating our culture of equality, diversity and inclusion among our teams, and on continuously shaping the company behaviours, processes and policies required to do this.

In 2023, we put in place strategic initiatives to drive more inclusive hiring, in an effort to close our gender pay gap, which included:

  • Conducting a full review of our benefits, with the aim of improving our employee value proposition (EVP) in order to target top female talent. From this review, we  enhanced our maternity offering at the beginning of the year, going even further by expanding the package in October 2023, to six months fully paid maternity leave. Alongside maternity leave, we have introduced a workplace nursery scheme, allowing working parents to pay their nursery fees via salary sacrifice and save on tax. And finally, we have enhanced pension scheme offering. 
  • Job levelling across the business, to ensure clarity of standards and expectations at the ‘Head of’ level and above. This new levelling scheme will support Motorway with an unbiased promotion process moving forward.
  • Launching partnerships with Black Girls in Tech and She Can Code in order to advertise all our engineering roles with their networks, through their careers pages and newsletters. In 2023 we made one hire through our partners at Black Girls in Tech and in 2024 will continue investing in the gender balanced engineering teams of the future. 

However, like many other tech companies, our gender pay gap continues to be impacted by an ongoing shortage of women in the engineering sector. This inevitably limits the number of female candidates applying for open roles and has led to a gender imbalance at Motorway, specifically in our upper quartile, where 18% of the roles are made up of female talent. This unfortunately means that our mean gender pay gap is higher than we would like, at 21.4%. 

What will we do to change this in 2024?

Our purpose at Motorway is to build a better car market for tomorrow, for everyone. This of course means we need to continue to build a pipeline of talented women entering the business, particularly into specialist tech and leadership positions, as well as supporting our existing female employees to develop their careers and progress into more senior roles in the company. 

In 2024, we will:

  • Leverage our EVP by communicating the experience of female talent working at Motorway. This will enable us to attract candidates who are a natural fit and value the benefits they’ll receive in return for their skills and experience. 
  • Introduce a mentorship programme aimed at supporting female talent at Motorway. 
  • Increase our focus on data, which will provide a better understanding of the diversity in our recruitment pipeline. This will allow us to make informed decisions on where to focus our diversity efforts, and ensure an equitable process.
  • Introduce company wide diversity & inclusion training for leaders and managers. Alongside interview training, this training will raise everyone’s awareness of their unconscious biases and this is the starting point to change behaviours. We will then roll out to all our employees.

We will be reviewing our plan to reduce our gender pay gap on a quarterly basis and our hiring plans monthly at executive level, to ensure we remain focussed on taking action and improving over the next 12 months and beyond.

About Motorway

Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace. We connect people selling their car directly with our network of more than 5,000 verified car dealers, matching each seller on our platform with the dealer who most wants to buy their car. We help car owners sell their cars 100% online for a great price in as little as 24 hours, with their car collected from home for free, while supporting our car dealer partners to easily acquire the best used car stock.