By Open Partners
Open Partners is one of the UK’s largest and fastest-growing full-service marketing agencies, specialising in performance-driven strategy across key verticals including automotive, hospitality, travel and leisure, retail, and professional services. Renowned for its integrated approach and data-led innovation, the agency helps leading brands connect strategy, creativity, and technology to deliver measurable growth.
Setting the scene: The aggregator problem
Over the past decade, fleet, rental, and mobility operators have seen their customer acquisition models increasingly dominated by third-party platforms. Aggregators promised reach and simplicity – instant visibility to millions of customers searching for short-term rentals, fleet solutions, or vehicle access. Yet, over time, this dependence has quietly eroded profitability, brand differentiation, and data ownership.
Today, many operators find themselves in a position where utilisation rates are falling, acquisition costs are rising, and loyalty is stagnating. At the same time, post-pandemic consumer behaviour has shifted sharply toward digital-first, frictionless experiences – expectations often better met by tech-led intermediaries than by the brands themselves. Layer in post-EV investment cost pressures, and the need to recoup margin without surrendering customer relationships has become a board-level priority.
A shift in the power balance
Aggregators were once partners, but for many automotive brands, they are now competitors. They own the search traffic – including the lion’s share of AI generated search results – shape the customer experience, and control the pricing environment. When every customer touchpoint, from discovery to booking, sits within someone else’s interface, brands lose not only visibility, but also the ability to differentiate on value, service, or experience.
This dependency also restricts insight. Customer data becomes fragmented or inaccessible, limiting operators’ ability to understand demand patterns, predict churn, or optimise pricing strategies. In short: the operator becomes a supplier rather than a brand.
But change is already underway. A new generation of AI-powered marketing is enabling mobility businesses to reclaim control of the customer journey – driving direct demand, improving utilisation, and rebuilding brand equity.
Reclaiming the journey with AI-led marketing automation
To recapture market share from aggregators, operators must focus on three key areas of digital transformation: discoverability, personalisation, and operational intelligence.
1. Discoverability: competing where customers begin their search
AI-driven search and media platforms are rewriting the rules of discoverability. Generative search tools, voice assistants, and conversational interfaces are replacing the traditional “10 blue links” organic model. Fleet and mobility brands that fail to optimise for these environments risk disappearing from customer consideration entirely.
Investing in first-party data strategy and AI-optimised paid campaigns allows brands to connect directly with high-intent audiences – reducing reliance on costly aggregator bids. Using predictive models to identify peak demand windows, brands can dynamically allocate budgets to moments that matter most.
2. Personalisation: creating experiences customers remember
Loyalty in mobility can be fragile because brand experiences can feel transactional and inconsistent to the end user. AI-powered advertising, in particular those that harmonise data into a singular advertising engine, can change that. By integrating data across booking systems, websites, and telematics, brands can automate personalised journeys – from predictive service reminders to contextual offers for repeat bookings.
This level of intelligent personalisation doesn’t just increase conversion rates; it strengthens the emotional connection between the customer and the brand – something aggregators cannot replicate.
3. Automation: From Reactive to Proactive Revenue Management
Fleet and rental operators are facing intense margin pressure, particularly after major investments in electric vehicles. AI-led marketing automation offers a way to restore control by tightly linking demand forecasting, dynamic pricing, and campaign execution. Instead of relying on broad, reactive discounts, AI systems can detect shifts in demand, adjust pricing in real time, and automatically trigger targeted promotions across digital channels. Marketing spend and messaging are optimised continuously, ensuring that offers are both timely and profitable.
Together, these capabilities enable operators to move from reactive discounting to proactive, data-driven revenue management – maintaining healthy utilisation rates while protecting margins and strengthening brand control.
Together, these AI applications enable a shift from reactive discounting to proactive revenue management – restoring control and profitability to the brand.
Achieving this digital transformation for your brand
At Open Partners, we’ve developed proprietary AI solutions that help automotive, fleet, and rental brands align marketing, data, and creative for measurable growth.
With a number of clients across automotive, hospitality, retail, and homebuilding facing similar challenges, we identified the need for smarter, faster, and better advertising solutions tailored to the needs of these businesses – ones that deliver hyper-local, personalised, and scalable advertising fit for delivering on a national and local scale while maximising the AI-driven marketing landscape.
In response to these challenges, Open Partners created bespoke advertising tools across paid search and paid social that enable brands to seamlessly migrate to an AI-led digital strategy that targets consumers with the right message, in the right place, at the right time, facilitating scalable growth and better returns.
They also enable the production of high quality creative assets at scale, that are continually tested, optimised, and improved, unlocking a new ROI lever that many brands are failing to capitalise on.
For multi-site automotive groups, Open Partners’ best-in-class use of AI, game-changing in-house marketing tech stack, and expertise in ROI-driven strategies position us as an ideal agency partner for ambitious automotive brands seeking growth.
The importance of action
For many brands, reducing aggregator dependency is already on the business transformation agenda. For C-suite leaders, the opportunity lies in rethinking digital marketing not as an acquisition channel, but as a strategic lever for direct demand generation, customer ownership, and sustainable margin recovery.
With the right investment in AI and digital integration, fleet and mobility operators can reclaim the wheel – steering their brands toward a future defined by autonomy, agility, and profitability. We’ve created the technology to empower operators to do just that, giving them an exceptional competitive advantage over competitors while completely modernising the marketing approach.
To learn more about Open Partners’ digital marketing solutions and to explore the growth opportunity for your brand, contact us below.
