| Winner | Trade Me |
| Marketing initiative | Right place, right time, real time |
| Marketing partners | Hightouch, Snowflake, Segment, Claude |
| Finalists | 2degrees, Meridian Energy, Mitre 10 |
| Judges’ comments | “A technically ambitious entry that showed the power of customer data in driving relevance at scale. This was a clear, long-term data-driven programme requiring cross-functional collaboration to drive sustained commercial outcomes, not just one-off results.” |
Real-time recs are a winner
Trade Me rebuilt its recommendation engine to connect with members at just the right moment.
Trade Me’s lifecycle marketing function had strong reach, connecting with more than 50% of its active members. But the timing was off. Reach wasn’t translating into results because members often received communications once their intent had peaked or passed.
Trade Me’s models were journey agnostic and lacked visibility of where a member was in their decision-making process. Batch-processing members’ actions was also creating a critical lag and causing relevant recommendations to arrive too late.
Knowing that timing is everything, Trade Me saw an opportunity to close the gap between expressed intent and its marketing response.
“Reach without relevance is just noise. Real-time relevance, at scale, is a genuine competitive advantage,” says Trade Me.
Trade Me’s international comparators operate with dynamic, behaviour-led recommendations already. So this was becoming a baseline expectation.
It was time to create this capability locally and in-house, rebuilding the recommendation engine that powered Trade Me’s lifecycle marketing function. It went from batch-processed, daily-refresh models to a real-time, self-served, omni-channel engine, using semantic similarity and live behavioural signals.
It was a cross-disciplinary challenge that required data infrastructure, data science capability and product buy-in to converge simultaneously.
“We shifted our entire approach: from campaign-led execution to intent-led orchestration. The result was a step change in both relevance and effectiveness,” says Trade Me.
Unlocking value
The programme had three objectives: increase the relevance of lifecycle marketing communications, demonstrate that reach and relevance could scale together and build a self-served capability that would compound over time.
A use case from the Motors vertical proved that maintaining reach while increasing relevance could be done. It delivered a 26x increase in email volume with a 0.85 percentage point decline in click rate.
Timely, personalised recommendations drove meaningful growth across all four Trade Me verticals: Property, Motors, Jobs and Marketplace. This generated a big lift in monthly gross merchandise sales in Marketplace alone, outperforming previous top-funnel benchmarks. It also saw the unsubscribe rate reduce drastically, a key indicator that members valued what they were being sent.
“These outcomes directly support our broader strategy of unlocking more value from existing audiences, rather than simply chasing new ones,” says Trade Me.
“We did not simply build a better engine. We built the infrastructure to keep building better engines.”
This story comes from NZ Marketing magazine issue 88, Sept-Nov 2026. Why not subscribe? Get four issues a year for just $50 (including delivery) if you autorenew.
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