Built for
Automotive.

Before AXL MEDIA, before 140+ dealerships, OEM consulting, and a team spanning Australia and New Zealand, it started with one person who saw a shift before anyone else did.

Dimitri Kotov. Working inside a large automotive group, Facebook was still "that thing kids used." Nobody in the industry was seriously using social media to sell cars.

But Dimitri had a hunch: what if dealers could generate real leads through social? He convinced his employer to let him run a small internal experiment.

• No one had done it before
• No playbooks existed
• Just gut feel and a willingness to test

After proving the concept, Dimitri went out on his own, starting what would become Ignite Group, a lean social media agency focused entirely on helping dealerships use Facebook properly.

The name changed. The scale changed. But the mission hasn't: help automotive brands use digital better, with real leads, not just likes.

In the early years, we're a little ashamed to admit something.

We built client artwork in PowerPoint.

Not Photoshop. Not Illustrator. Just straight-up PowerPoint slides doing the work of a design suite.

Then one day, a client asked us to supply "working files."

Technically, we could have sent them. But handing over a .ppt file as creative production would've been embarrassing. So we did what any scrappy operator would do:

That one moment of needing to look credible turned into something real. Today we have a full-time creative team of six designers, producing work recognised by the likes of Toyota, Ford, and Volkswagen Australia.

From PowerPoint decks to campaigns that move metal. Still the first story Dimitri tells new team members on day one.

AXL MEDIA, formerly Ignite Group, is the attribution-first marketing agency built specifically for automotive. We don't do generalist campaigns. Every strategy, every channel, every dollar is optimised for one outcome: dealership growth you can actually measure.

We work with 100+ automotive brands, consult with national OEMs on digital strategy, and run high-performance campaigns across Meta, Google, YouTube, Spotify, and more.

But the thing that still gets us out of bed is the same thing it always was: seeing a dealer's results change, not through guesswork, but through data, attribution, and campaigns that hold themselves accountable.