Rightmove's Matt Bushby Is Building the Belief of Home Ownership

“The brand is absolutely critical,” states Matt Bushby, Rightmove’s chief marketing officer, as he talks about the success of the property website and how it has grown to amass 2.2 billion annual visits from the UK alone.

Bushby has been with the company for two-and-a-half years, and it is the latest in a long line of digital platforms that he has been involved in, stemming right back to Friends Reunited and traversing JustEat and FindMyPast along the way.

He admits that his continual focus across digital brands over almost 25 years as a marketer has not been by design, but his beginnings running Friends Reunited, the original social network, “hooked” him in. This is because such digital brands have the ability to give instantaneous feedback from users on everything that a company does, and is a fascination he maintains in his role today.

“I always loved the fact that what you also got was lots and lots of feedback, and that's feedback in terms of what people thought of you, but data as well, and the ability to understand what's working and what's not.

"How do we change things? How do we evolve and develop and do things? And I think it, almost slightly perversely, gives you a platform where you can take more risk, because it means that you can flex and you can adapt and you can move as you go. It's always been a bit of an anathema to me, when people talk about ‘digital transformation’ or talk about ‘the digital team’, having always worked in that environment,” he says.

And while there was no plan to focus on digital, Bushby sees how he may have undervalued the experience as having witnessed more marketers struggle to get to grips with modern parts of the job that he has long accepted as becoming the norm. This includes attribution and understanding consumer data, which every marketer is now expected to focus upon no matter the sector they work in.

Through a focus on delivering value to the customer and placing their needs at the heart of the businesses communications, Bushby believes he has managed to succeed from sector to sector - these are transferable perspectives across marketing.

“If you have that customer ethos in your head, then the excitement comes from learning about different sectors and how you can take some of the things that you've developed over time and use those to hopefully improve things and add value in those different sectors,” he explains.

Perhaps to be expected from a marketer with such deep digital experience, Rightmove is no longer as focussed on TV as its main marketing channel, having grown to include video on demand, with YouTube a firm focus. It also is present on social, having launched its own TikTok channel as a place to entertain. And with most audiences coming directly to the platform, its paid search activity is surprisingly low also.

“What we've tried to do is to adapt and evolve our advertising and our communications to fit into those different places. So we're understanding a bit more around the different property needs and wants of our consumers,” he says, although TV advertising remains an important ingredient too.

Making the Rightmove

After six-and-a-half years at JustEat, latterly as UK and Ireland marketing director (which included the online delivery boom experienced by the pandemic), Bushby joined Rightmove in the autumn of 2022. This was shortly after the current CEO, Johan Svanstrom, joined the business, and has allowed them to offer a fresh perspective towards growth.

Since joining, Bushby has seen the platform grow its engagement and claims that over 80 per cent of all time spent on property portals is on Rightmove. He has also introduced a brand platform – 'Believe It' – which was released in 2023 to inspire people to take the leap and chase their dream move.

“The scale is phenomenal,” he states as he cites the annual visitor performance which means that the Rightmove brand is widely recognised and claims that sentiment towards it is also “really positive” with the majority of visits coming directly to the site.

“They come to Rightmove because they want to come to Rightmove and that is down to the fundamental power of the brand, which has driven that behaviour,” he explains. During his time at the company he has sought to evolve the brand and show how it can offer a bigger role in the lives of consumers.

“That really took us to a brand platform, which was to give you the belief that you can make your move. That gave us a place where we could think about ways in which we can help people to find a mortgage, help people to value their home, help people to work to build a digital rental journey, help our partners to run their businesses, in a way that allowed them to focus on the stuff that we're really good at,” he adds.

'Believe It' has been developed to work for a broad audience and still has a long way to go and a lot of opportunity in its evolution, Bushby believes. And part of that will be to entertain and engage with wider groups, including young people with new experiences and opportunities across its marketing.

Reality stars and Dream Homes

Over the 2024 Christmas break and into the new year, Rightmove released two campaigns – one to underline the 'Believe It' focus featuring a woman tidying up her house in the morning before diving off a high cliff into the sea as part of her daily routine.

The second ‘Selling Sunderland’ features reality star Charlotte Crosby fronting a faux property TV show that sees her explore surprisingly glamorous houses for sale in her hometown. The humour-filled 90-second film is perhaps a surprise direction for Rightmove to take and underlines Bushby’s desire to take it in new directions.

He explains that while developing the brand platform, they discovered that the sector generally produced advertising that focused on “a straightforward, linear journey” of a person’s property life; grow up with parents, leave home, go to university, get a dog, get married, etc. Yet he doesn’t believes that anybody’s life works in such a straight line as that.

“It has all sorts of ups and downs and zigzags that go on through it. We’re giving you the belief that you can make any number of moves depending on what's going on in your life, your move is not always to the big house with the white picket fence,” he explains, revealing that 'Selling Sunset' was created with the express wish to showcase the variety of options at a variety of prices available across the UK – including Sunderland.

He also wants to avoid Rightmove’s marketing from being “boring”.

“People need to engage with the things you're doing and having those emotional hooks becomes such an important way of doing that.”

The world according to Matt Bushby

Who is your creative hero, or marketing hero?

I've leaned on and taken the view and advice of so many people throughout my career. I know the answer to so few questions that it's important to go and find the people that do know the answers. So if I go back through the people I've worked with; people like when I was at Friends Reunited - Tim Ward and people at JustEat like Barnaby Dawe and Peter Duffy, they've all been so generous with their time and so generous with their advice. They are people who will just give you 10 minutes to think about how you approach a problem, or how you do that. That's one of the important things that is true across the industry - people are generous with their time and with their advice, and they will help you out.

What has been your boldest creative play?

We did something last year, which we sort of span up really quickly because the election came around and we realised after about a week that no one was talking about the housing market at all. We played around with a couple of social ideas and then we suddenly thought: “Well, bugger it. We're the biggest player in property, we should do something bigger than this”. So we bought up a load of space in the national press and a load of digital space, and basically just called out the party leaders just as we were coming into all of the debates and asked, “Why you're not talking about housing?”.

We saw this opportunity to represent. We're a marketplace so we've got agents, we've got consumers, and both of them really wanted it on the agenda. We thought it was important to be on the agenda and we decided that this should b our job. This should be our role to play in the market to do that. So we did it, and we kept going, and we kept going. And then we started contacting the offices of Starmer and Sunak… The eventual outcome of it was that they both came and did exclusive interviews with us the week before the election and it worked for them because they got to talk to the biggest home moving audience in the UK. And it worked for us because it meant that we put housing further up the agenda.

You might not take it as being necessarily a creative play in its purest sense, but it was. We've got an opportunity. How do we just lean into this opportunity and think about how a brand can play just a fundamental role in doing something that does genuinely add value, rather than feeling as though it's a gimmick? It's trying to bring something to the top of the agenda. That's tremendous.

How is AI changing your role or affecting your role?

AI is incredibly powerful and will offer huge opportunity. You could say 2024 has been a year of discovery and experimentation. I think 2025 and beyond is when AI is going to start to be properly embedded into businesses and going to start to be part of the way we manage our businesses, and it's got to help us to answer questions. It's got to be additive. The question for me is never 'how can we use AI?'. The question is 'what challenges and opportunities do we have as a business and can AI help us to create better answers to those questions?'.

That for me is super important. We're looking as a marketing team at ways in which AI can help us drive more efficiency to drive more scale, and then to deliver more value as well. I think, where we've started in most sectors, marketing, particularly has been about efficiency and scale. Where we are going to deliver value creation will be the interesting part, and that's, that's how we're working. We're challenging ourselves, we're challenging our teams and we're challenging our agencies to make sure that we're curious, and we're learning, and we're trying to find out what works and doing stuff.

And we've done some stuff that's worked, we've done some stuff that's not worked, but we need to do more of that. We're going to fail a load of times in trying to work out how this all works and fits together. So, I'm excited by it, but it's got to be there to solve problems. It should never be something you do just because you think it's a nice way of getting a press release out the door.

What makes a good creative agency partner?

A good creative agency partner for me is an agency that genuinely wants to understand your business and wants to work out how it can support beyond just advertising.

Advertising is important, of course it is. When we bought Neverland on board, they spent a long time, as we were sort of working out a new brand platform, not just with the CEO, with the exec team, but with people all the way through the business, from our customer care teams to our product development teams to our design team.

How do you really get under the skin of the business? And then how do you spend time with our consumers and our partners to properly understand it? That then means, I think, that you're helping the marketing team to do the thing that the marketing team absolutely should do, which is to be a driver of commercial value in an organisation, and to do that by putting the customer at the heart of it.

I think that creates a great agency partner because they do that, and yes, they'll do great advertising, but they'll also help you to understand and get your teeth into knotty problems and to be able to solve those things. It’s about great people, and that's what, for me, you buy into with agencies - you buy into the people who are going to work with you and are going to form part of your team over the long term.

What makes a good creative marketer?

I think a good creative marketer is somebody who understands that marketing has a big positive role to play in an organisation. Creativity for a purpose is critical. Creativity for the sake of creativity is one thing, but actually, when it serves a purpose and when it delivers value in an organisation is where a marketer is powerful.

You have somebody who understands the value that creativity can add to a business, how that creativity enhances the brand, and that brand plays a critical role in the growth of the business. I think that as a fundamental framing that is important.

Underneath that, then is curiosity, the willingness to take risks. Risk taking is important to creativity. You find that there is a pretty straight route to safety, and that route doesn't tend to ever end in the best and the most engaging work. So being willing to do that, but also, really understanding your customer, because again, what you want is creativity for a purpose, and creativity that engages customers and helps them, adds value to them, and, by consequence, then adds value to the business.