IMA's new Autotrader campaign has friends, strangers and enemies all nudging car buyers towards the marketplace, backed by 432.6 million projected impressions.
Autotrader has launched Passing Comments, a new advertising campaign in which friends, strangers and even people the car buyer does not much like all offer the same unsolicited advice: have you tried Autotrader? It is the second phase of It’s Time for Autotrader, the brand platform IMA launched in October 2025, and it launched this week across TV, streaming, outdoor, radio, podcasts and social.
The films play on something very British: everybody has an opinion about your car, and nobody waits to be asked. Would-be buyers are nudged towards Autotrader by the people around them, from friends to bystanders to, as Decision Marketing put it, “enemies”. Storm & Shelter produced the films, IMA handled the post-production in house, and Open Partners is the media agency.
Rox Nejad, Autotrader’s head of brand, said the idea is to cure “analysis paralysis by giving consumers a clear first step”, as Decision Marketing reported. Ben Ducker, executive creative director at IMA, said the ad taps into the British psyche in a fun way.
The campaign is aimed at 25 to 44 year olds, with 432.6 million projected impressions and a predicted 80 per cent reach of that audience. There are 300 premium poster sites in London, Manchester and Birmingham, and a second burst is planned for early 2027. The insight driving it is Autotrader’s own finding that 71 per cent of buyers start the process without a clear idea of which car they want.
Autotrader has a classic category problem. People buy a car every few years, so for most of the time most of its audience is not in the market, and the brand has to be the first name they think of the moment they are. That is a job for broad, memorable brand advertising rather than search ads, and Marketing Week reported on Monday that Autotrader is investing more confidently in brand for exactly that reason.
Word of mouth is also a well-chosen device for a marketplace that sells trust. It is the same territory Go.Compare has been working to win back, where being known is not the same as being liked. For the full list of the adverts that best did that job in this category, see our ranking of the best car adverts.
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