Published on: October 28, 2026

Early in her career, Jessica Hunter checked her page-view dashboard more often than her inbox. Today, as Director of Advertising at Gumtree Group, whose Gumtree, CarsGuide and Autotrader platforms are used by more than five million Australians, she watches for a different signal: how close an audience is to making a decision. Earlier, she spent more than six years as Daily Mail’s commercial director for Australia and New Zealand and led brand and agency partnerships at Cartology, the retail media business of supermarket giant Woolworths.

In this exclusive conversation, Hunter explains what changed her mind, and why that signal can be as ordinary as a tradie researching power tools or someone preparing to move house.

You’ve worked across a publisher, retail media, youth culture and now marketplaces. What’s one thing about advertising that has held true across all four?

“The audience always tells you the truth, if you’re willing to listen.”

At News Corp and Daily Mail, it was what people chose to read. At Cartology, it was what landed in their trolley. At Vinyl Group, it was what young Australians actually cared about (which was rarely what brands assumed!l). And at Gumtree Group, it’s what people are buying, selling and searching for every single day.
The formats, the tech and the acronyms are changing constantly. But the businesses that win are always the ones that understand their audience better than anyone else, and can turn that understanding into something truly valuable for advertisers.

Marketplaces built their business around transactions and are now making a bigger case for their media value. What’s the hardest perception to shift with advertisers?

That we’re a classifieds platform with some ad space attached. A lot of advertisers still picture marketplaces as the place you go to list a couch, and they underestimate what we can do for their brand-building activity. For the record, we do love a good couch listing!
The reality is that our audience is in one of the most valuable mindsets there is: they’re making decisions. Someone reading CarsGuide reviews or comparing listings on Autotrader is researching, weighing up their options and getting ready to spend.
The perception shifts when we can show what happens after the impression. With our lead generation formats, brands can see exactly how many high-intent customers came to them through our platform. Once advertisers can see those outcomes, the conversation changes very quickly.

Retail media knows what a shopper is likely to buy. Marketplaces know what people are actively trying to buy or sell. Which intent signal do advertisers understand better, and which are they still getting wrong?

Having worked in both, I’d say advertisers understand retail media signals better right now, largely because retail media has done a brilliant job of telling its story. Purchase and search data from a supermarket is intuitive: it’s close to the till, and it’s easy to connect to sales.
Where advertisers still underestimate marketplaces is how breadth and depth work together. On CarsGuide and Autotrader, we see deep, in-market intent: someone comparing three specific SUVs is about as strong a signal as you’ll find. But across our categories, we also see the life moments that come before it. Take a tradie who’s researching power tools, listing his services and hiring an apprentice. Put those together, and there’s a strong chance a new ute may be on the shopping list!

“Depth tells you who’s ready to buy now. Breadth tells you who’s likely to be next.”

Retail media is brilliant at the moment of purchase, but marketplaces can offer both, and the smartest advertisers will use all of it.

Someone scrolling a feed and someone actively hunting for something are in completely different headspaces. What does the industry still get wrong about treating that attention as the same?

Display and social media have got much better at measuring attention, but attention and intent are two very different things.

“Attention metrics can tell you whether someone saw an ad. They can’t always tell you whether that person was ready to act on it.”

Feed attention is about interruption. You’re trying to stop someone mid-scroll and plant a seed. Hunting attention is about relevance. That person has come looking for something, and if your ad helps them make a better decision, they’ll welcome it. Social commerce is starting to blur those lines, but the real difference is how close the ad sits to a decision.
That’s where marketplaces stand apart. People come to Gumtree, CarsGuide and Autotrader with a job to do: buy a car, sell a couch, find a tradie. In that moment, the right ad becomes part of the answer.

Marketplaces hold some of the strongest first-party intent data available. Where is that advantage still being undersold to advertisers?

Many advertisers still buy marketplaces for reach, without using the intent data that makes that audience so valuable in the first place.
The real opportunity is connecting the dots across categories. Someone selling their furniture, browsing rentals and buying a second-hand fridge is very likely moving house (or having a very dramatic spring clean!). For an energy provider, that’s the perfect moment to reach them: they need to connect power at a new address, and they’re open to switching. Across Gumtree’s marketplace categories, we see these life moments as they happen, which means we can put advertisers in front of people at exactly the point they’re making a decision.

“Between platform privacy changes and privacy reform here in Australia, consented first-party data is becoming one of the most valuable assets in the market, and marketplaces have it at scale”

What’s a measure of advertising success you trusted early in your career that you no longer rely on?

Page views. Early in my career, page views were everything. More traffic meant more inventory, which meant more revenue. I checked that dashboard more often than my inbox!

What changed my thinking was seeing how quickly that link can break. People can now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews a question and get the answer in one place, so traffic alone is becoming a far less reliable measure of an audience’s value. That’s one reason I value marketplace audiences so highly: an AI summary can tell you which SUV is well reviewed, but it can’t sell you the car, finance it or buy your old one.

So now I also look at average revenue per user (ARPU) and revenue per page (RPP): how engaged an audience is, how close they are to a decision, and what that’s worth to an advertiser. That’s a much better test of whether you’re building something sustainable.

Volume is always nice, but value is what lasts. And if you can have both? Even better!