Driving Success: Connecting Cars and Customers with Advanced Streaming Media Solutions

Speaker 1  0:08  
Music, meet, drive force marketing and Family of Brands streaming media solution. Drive connects advanced audiences to premiere inventory across streaming media platforms. Drive generates dynamic videos based on your current inventory. The videos are then distributed to platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, CTV, OTT and programmatic networks in a matter of seconds. With drive, you can track in store visits, make real time edits to pricing incentives and disclaimers and make videos for your entire inventory with automated content generation, each ad delivers the right offer to the right shopper at the right time based on that shopper's pre identified behaviors. Start your streaming media strategy today with Drive.

Ann-Marie Johnson  0:58  
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in, we've got something great in store for you today, a little bit different. We're here with our friends from force marketing. We are going to be talking about connecting cars and customers through advanced streaming media and audio from the living room to the showroom floor with Drive media. So joining us today, our hosts are going to be Paul J Daly. He is our CEO of ASOTU, as well as Jordan Cox, our head of community. And we'll also be joined by Cody Tomczyk. He is the senior vice president at force marketing, as well as Dane Tocco, Senior Director of Marketing at lithium motor so I'm going to go ahead and kick it over to them. Hope you enjoy

Paul J Daly  1:36  
it. Hey there, Jordan, what's up?

Jordan Cox  1:38  
Paul, thanks for having me.

Paul J Daly  1:39  
You were, you were growing a beard earlier in the week. I thought you were just gearing up for your big debut on a soda wedge webinars, but you just disappointed me.

Jordan Cox  1:49  
I disappointed myself, Paul. I was hoping it would be thicker and better. I was like, Oh man, got to go back to my back to my regular song.

Paul J Daly  1:55  
You bailed too early. You bailed too early. I'm excited that you're the co host for this episode, because you have an extensive marketing background, and you've just paid a lot of attention to different mediums throughout your career as a marketing director, and this, this what we're going to be talking about today. Seems like the next frontier of OTT and streaming and placing specific things in front of people in a new format. For

Jordan Cox  2:18  
sure, it is. I think what's always cool is when you can connect something that people like, and they can that they are able to connect with, that they understand, not only consumers, but also dealers. A lot of dealers really understand what linear TV is, but they don't really understand how to reach that in the new digital age. So when you're able to take all those things that work well and put the right messaging in front of the right audience, for people that are actually buying vehicles and showing those different things, as far as what makes them a shopper, like, that's, that's where everybody wins. Yeah, no

Paul J Daly  2:48  
doubt. Well, it's time to learn a little bit about this. If you're here at the webinars, because you're curious, you want to see what is even possible, which, I think that's kind of the, one of the questions that most people don't even know. Like, what is possible? Can I just, is it just a commercial? It's like much more than that. A lot of technology is being developed. So let's bring Cody and Dane into the show. There they are, gentlemen, welcome to the show today. Welcome all right. So Cody, you all have been developing this technology, and just, can you give us just a like, a 32nd background of like, why you went in this direction? Yeah,

Cody Tomczyk  3:23  
this all started pre covid, where we recognize the consumption of media by the consumers was just shifting more and more and more towards the streaming side. And this was a space where other industries, outside of retail, automotive, they had been leaning in heavily a lot earlier, and dealers were kind of behind on this front right, give us,

Paul J Daly  3:44  
give us an example, like, what industries were leaning into this. Maybe that'll be some familiar things that

Cody Tomczyk  3:49  
will, you know, consumer products, e commerce, obviously, in a really big way, right, just recognizing where the audiences are and where their attention is going. And then you sort of get all of this massively accelerated by covid, right, where everybody's sitting at home. And now the streaming numbers, you know, jumped considerably. And this now is not an option of where dealers need to be, right? They have to be here. But it's also, as you alluded to, right? It's, it's a big unknown, and I think that gives the dealers, you know, a little bit of fear in what they're doing, like, Am I doing it right, or am I just sort of checking a box, because I think I have to be here right? And so we've been trying to evolve it in a way that not only sort of matches where the consumer is, it helps a dealer understand specifically how it's helping their business right, like metrics that actually matter to them.

Paul J Daly  4:37  
Dane, obviously, Lithia is a very sophisticated marketing group. What is your position just generally on this type of marketing? And what is it about it that gets you excited?

Dane Tocco  4:48  
Yeah, it's, it's extremely exciting, because the market, as you guys know, the automotive and just in general, is has completely done a 180 over the last, you know, four or five years. And most of our leaders in this industry are very veteran leaders that have 1015, 20, plus years of experience and and what gets me excited is, is bringing the data to the table and showing showing these leaders of how hard this industry has changed and where the marketing strategy have to be, and then seeing that all come to life. So when you go in and talk to a guy who's been doing doing the same thing as a general manager for 20 years, and convince him that, hey, we need to make a change. We need to make a change fast, because what you've been doing is no longer hitting the customer that we need to go after and then seeing that all come to life, and all these, you know, leads come in, and website go, traffic goes up, and people viewing you and seeing you, it's you definitely change percent perspective of long term leaders in this industry and say, Holy, Holy, Holy graft. I didn't know that this, this stuff changed, and we are completely revamping marketing strategies across the company right now.

Paul J Daly  5:59  
All right, I think we're going to get into a really great presentation. So Cody, I think you're steering the ship on this one. Educate us, let us know what we should be paying attention to and what's possible in this new world. Yeah,

Cody Tomczyk  6:11  
so kind of jumping in here Dane's point around the last four or five years. I mean, heck, if you look at the last 12 to 18 months, right, things have changed, right? We've got some headwinds out there, right? The the money's not just falling out of the sky like it was two years ago, you know, with the profit per vehicle, and, you know, dealers are getting back into I've got to advertise, but, but it's harder, right? So one thing we want to do is sort of level set on the State of the Union, to identify the challenges versus, you know, the opportunities and and frankly, this is a lot of what I talk to people like Dane about, right? We're not trying to solve marketing problems. Specifically, we're trying to solve business opportunities or business objectives. So you sit here today, right? We've got increasing day supply, but it varies brand to brand, and it varies model to model, right? So there's an opportunity that exists within that. Obviously, there's increased competition in the market, right? Everybody's sort of woken up from tier three, you know, dealers and individual stores and large groups like Lithia, you know, all the way up to the manufacturers and the third parties and sort of everything in between. There's a real need to go fast, right? That we can't just set a plan and say, Okay, well, we're going to get to this plan soon. And, you know, we're going to implement all these things in sort of this hurry up and wait environment. We've got to go quick. We've got to, more importantly, adjust quick, right? The allocation is changing. Incentives are changing. Day. Supply is killing us. On the Floor Plan, like we got to go fast, and then right at the end of the day, measuring what works, right? That matters, I think, more than anything else. And attribution has changed, and we've got to change along with it, right? Can I?

Paul J Daly  7:48  
Can I just drill in for a second when you talk about advertising, speed to market, I think days to market for inventory is a very familiar term to dealers, right? Like understanding from when I buy that vehicle, the clock starts ticking, so I have to have it recon, photographed, put online. And you know, if my days to market is slow on that I'm really going to my holding costs are going to go up, less likely I'm going to retail that for what I thought I was going to when I purchased. It is advertising speed to market. Like a similar principle.

Cody Tomczyk  8:19  
Yeah, exactly right. Because the longer it sits there without eyeballs on it, right? We're absorbing cost against this, right? I mean, Dane, you and I were talking about this a few weeks ago around just offers and incentives. And, okay, guess what? The manufacturer changed the offers again. And, gosh, if it's stellantis, they change it six times in a month, right? Like, you've got to go fast to get these BEST OFFERS out there, quantify it a little bit, right? I mean, you sit across all the brands, right?

Dane Tocco  8:47  
Yeah. So our goal, our goal is to be time to market is two to two days or 48 hours from the time offers are released that we have stuff live offers out there, live, and then from a merchandising perspective, call it used cars. We want to be live to the consumer within four or five days. Now, when all these changes happen with marketing different strategies, so did our team. So we now have operations in our title, because we're going in the stores. And I have to from an operation standpoint, I need to know what their floor plan is. I need to know what their day supply is. I need to know all these things, what their heavy models that they're selling, which ones they aren't selling. Because this, this type of marketing is is so specific to a very specific customer. And we can get as narrow or as wide as we want, but if I don't know their operations and how the business is running, where they're at today, I can, I can put anything together, and it may not work, but when I know their operations, and my team is zoned in on their operations, we can zone in on a marketing plan and be very, you know, conscious to cost and really execute really, really well when we, when you have both those pieces together,

Paul J Daly  9:58  
got it? Yeah. All right, let's go back. Keep going. So

Cody Tomczyk  10:02  
we've got to solve for these things. So when we're thinking about going to market, we have to go to market now, in today's environment with model specific strategies, right? The investment has to match the need. And that's not just a need in terms of, I've got the cars and I need to sell them, but more specifically matching how much demand is there in my market for this vehicle relative to what I need to sell, right? So that's where it opens up. The need for a full funnel approach. Everybody plays in the bottom of the funnel. You talk to any dealer I want to be, I want in market, customers in market, in market. Well, guess what? So does every other dealer, so does every manufacturer, so does every third party. That's an expensive and noisy place to play. And if we can come up a little bit, there's an opportunity to have a much less noisy conversation quickly and cost effectively, to narrow them down into your funnel, right? And then that speed to market. How do you create a personalized experience at Dane's point for every single customer, very, very quickly, and then at the end of the day, and this is where I think marketing in general needs to continue to evolve. In retail Auto is what are the metrics that matter? Because, guess what? To a general manager, impressions, clicks, views, right? Who cares? At the end of the day? Did I sell more of that model? Did I increase my turn rate on that model, or did I not? Right? That's right, because

Paul J Daly  11:23  
although all those metrics can lie easily, oh, you

Cody Tomczyk  11:27  
give me Dane, right, we can make any metric tell whatever story we want, right? Give me a spreadsheet and a metric, and I can tell you, say

Dane Tocco  11:34  
it all the time. There's never been a vendor that came into my office or came to a meeting and showed me bad data. That's right. They're all good data. They're all going to bring good results. And we actually started building a dashboard that that now it's like, okay, you I have the marketing data that you guys don't really understand, but I got the results that you do guys do understand for your sort did you? And it comes down to do things, did you service more cars, or did you or did you sell more cars? If you didn't do one of those two things? And we just invested an extra 10 grand a month for the last 90 days. It obviously didn't work. We need to redirect. And hey, we're not perfect, but we know when to redirect because we're paying attention to how the dealer's business outcomes are on a monthly basis.

Paul J Daly  12:15  
I think you just brought up a point, and it's a slight tangent, but a relevant tangent, and a common one, that is, I think it's kind of a chronic I'll call it a I'll be I'll be dramatic. I'll call it a chronic disease in the minds of general managers. And that is the fact that when you spend, especially if you're spending a little bit up in the funnel, that you need to measure and quickly change the whole thing in 30 days, the fact that you just said 90 days just warmed my heart up, because even as a public company, you know, looking at things on a 90 day cycle is pretty common, right? Because you have earnings reports and things like that, but it takes time for things to settle in. And I just wanted to drop that in there, because I hear it all the time, and a lot of times I will see a dealer adopt a good tool that works, and just don't give it enough time to bake, right? And then they pull the cake out of the oven, they throw it away, and they put another one, and they throw that one away 30 days. So I think that's not doing anyone any any justice there. So I'm glad you said that. I just wanted to highlight that

Cody Tomczyk  13:10  
the good news here, and we're going to highlight some of this in the next slide or two, the opportunity to measure that over time has increased significantly, so you can actually demonstrate measurably leaving this on translates to x versus shutting it off, turning it off, turning it on, shutting it off, right over and over

Paul J Daly  13:28  
again. Great. We'll let you keep going then. Yeah, so

Cody Tomczyk  13:31  
here's a rundown at a high level on drive right what we're aiming to to solve on those specific areas. So number one, we want to start with a profit center and a model specific strategy on the sales side. This is a significant departure for how dealers are used to operating, which is a channel specific strategy when they're building their marketing. I want to spend X dollars on paid search, and I want to spend X dollars on Facebook, and I want to spend right those channels are just means to an end. What business objective are we trying to solve? And let's start with that. From there, we want to figure out who we're going to talk to. Again, we're not on a channel yet, no publisher, just who are we going to talk to. And there's a lot of data out there. I mean, you're looking at a sort of an eye chart here on a bunch of the data partners that we work with, including all the major DMS providers and CRM providers out there. The reality though, is you can't get wrapped up in a logo, right? We've got to be able to validate the efficacy of the data, because there's good data and bad data from everybody at the end of the day from there now, we've got what we want to accomplish. We've got who we want to talk to it's about finding where we can go talk to those people. And we're going to get into some media consumption fragmentation in just a bit here. But you can't just pick one spot to be, because we all don't consume media in one spot. This is not 50 years ago where we had three channels to choose from. We have a million different ways to consume. Of our media today, and we've gotta be in a bunch of different places, personalizing the creative and more specifically, doing so at scale, and then finally, measuring what works at the end of the day, right? Measuring business outcomes, not measuring marketing outcomes, because, as Dane said, nobody cares, right? Nobody cares what the marketing metrics are. They care. Did your sales go up, did your market share go up? Did your CPR volume go up? Because if so great, then the marketing is working, right? We got to measure business outcomes. So a bit of an eye chart here, but it's important to think about the audience funnel in a different way. So when we first started chatting on this topic a few minutes ago, right, I mentioned everybody wants to play in the in market space, right? That is a noisy environment. And in market, as we define it, is seven to 30 days from purchase, and it's great. You do have to be there. There is high intent, but again, it's noisy, it's expensive. And so what we have evolved over the last five or six years of doing this is an audience segment that we define as pre market, which is 31 to 90 days from purchase. These are offline signals before online intent, right? This is I'm an inequity position. This is I had a life changing event, right? This is, I have a need, but I haven't started shopping yet, and on a first and third party side, through validating these audiences, right? You see some of the math on the right over here, and some of the things we're taking a look at, we're now able to start a conversation much sooner, in a much effective way, much more effective way, to ultimately bring those shoppers down the funnel into our in market funnel, not starting a conversation when everybody else is right. You'd much rather go one on one with these customers than to be, you know, speed dating with them, right, with every other dealer and every other OEM and every other third party aid provider, you know, at the exact same time. Huge opportunity to go up market, but you gotta do it effectively.

Paul J Daly  16:56  
Mm, hmm. So, oh, and I, actually, I know we're going to, we're going to talk about this a little bit when you just mentioned, go back one slide, if you could, what types of things you're talking about pre market. So versus in market. And I don't know if you're going to get to this later in your presentation. If you are, we can just punt and wait for that. Well,

Cody Tomczyk  17:16  
no, it's, I'll just double click on the point that pre market is using offline signals in advance of online intent, right? It says, I can get you to be in market, right? Whereas in market is, they've gone in there on autotrader, OEM sites, dealer sites, you know, cars.com right? They have started showing some sort of online intent, which is what most of these companies, these third party data providers, are using to define as an in market audience, and we're saying is get them before that, get them to start that conversation with you first,

Paul J Daly  17:50  
right? So, so if I'm if I'm hearing you right, is that you're trying to get them to take first actions Correct, right? And then based on those first actions, right? Then, at some point they'll be identified as in market. But you got to them first. So their first actions was an interaction with you. That's right, I

Dane Tocco  18:06  
gave you an example, Paul real quick, is, if you know, we're big leasing, leasing state in Metro Detroit, and when I have a customer that's 90 days out, I'm automatically going to start hitting them on social with, Hey, your lease is coming due. Get in front of them, directly addressable them, and just keep that getting in front of their head. That's pre market. And then once they really get closer to that date, now we can drill them on, okay, hey, now we got their attention. Now we can drill them on, hey, your lease is doing 30 days or emails and mailers and all these different things to really capture them right there in market, but they've already seen us pop into their funnel over the last 90 days. Understood that's excellent,

Cody Tomczyk  18:45  
excellent. Yeah, and the video and audio component that we're talking about here allows you to appeal to their emotion, not just price, right? We can tell a story in a lot more effective way. So, you know, this is Paul hitting you know your point that near and dear to your heart about like 90 days versus 30 days, right? So what we've done is we have, over the last 14 months, we have done a lot of analysis on the performance efficacy of these different audiences as a function of time. And it should be no surprise, right, that the longer you leave something on, the greater the opportunity is for it to succeed. But what's interesting is, is when you look at those, those audiences, where we started with them on pre market first, before just solely starting with them on in market, on average, when it comes to website conversions and store traffic, pre market audiences over 90 days, will perform 2.4 times higher than just going after in market audiences alone. But what's important, besides just leveraging the pre market audiences, to your point, Paul, which is, you know, you said near and dear, look at it as a function. Of time right on the bottom here, right? You're taking four to eight weeks just to get to what we would call average performance. But once you stay on longer, now you've got the opportunity to really leverage that, that that throughput right on the performance side.

Paul J Daly  20:16  
Why does it get better as time goes by? Well, it's

Cody Tomczyk  20:19  
a couple things, right? So it's frequency and message, right, which, by the way, age old advertising, right? You've got to have reach and frequency. But by starting that conversation sooner, we now have the opportunity to build that story and build that narrative. So while you can see both cur or both lines get better, right, over time, the pre market gets significantly better. That conversation Understood.

Paul J Daly  20:44  
Thank you.

Jordan Cox  20:45  
Exactly what's cool about that is you're creating that demand on like just through what you're doing. And it's not only just brand awareness, but really you're creating that next step in what they do, exactly right?

Cody Tomczyk  20:55  
And we're going to get on that messaging and probably two slides from now, all right, because there's a lot of data we've got to share on that. Let's keep going, right? So, right. So, so now we've got, we've got what we want to accomplish, right? The the models, we've got the audiences we want to talk to. Now it's about where do we reach that? And what you're seeing here in this animation, right? It's going to continue is that we know that streaming media consumption is high, right? And we know that it's it increased significantly after 2020 The interesting part is it's still increasing, right? The last two clips there are overall minutes consumed from 20 June 2023, was 37% of all media consumption minutes to June of this past or this year, has gone up to 40% so it's still climbing. Wow, right? And now it's the lion's share. But what I want to draw your attention to is the fragmentation represented on the left side of the screen here, yeah, because a lot of people say, Look, I'm going to go buy Hulu, right? I'm going to go buy spectrum, I'm going to go buy whatever, right? And that's great. You should reach those customers where they are. But if you are only going to Hulu, you're only going to 3% of the media consumption, right? If you are only going to Amazon, you're only getting to 3.1% three

Paul J Daly  22:16  
of that 40% that it is exactly

Cody Tomczyk  22:19  
right, and that speaks to the fragmentation of consumption. And so you've gotta be able to find the audience decoupled from the publisher. I want to know who I'm talking to, and then I want to go find where they're consuming their media, not the other way around. I don't want to go to the media and say, Go find me the people. I want to find the people and then figure out where they're consuming their media. And that's been a really effective strategy to make sure that we're not leaving anybody out just because we think Hulu's great, right? Or we've got a really awesome spectrum rep, right? Like, no, you want to reach people where they are

Paul J Daly  22:52  
great. That's great piece. Just keep rolling.

Cody Tomczyk  22:57  
So summary, view here, right? And this is a logo soup for the for the dealers that like the logos, right? It's important to understand, I

Paul J Daly  23:05  
see golf. I like golf. Yeah,

Cody Tomczyk  23:08  
this is not, this is not buying, you know, dog TV on streaming, right? This is premium inventory across a variety of publishers and devices. We want to reach people where they are. And that's just the purpose of tying this all together here is, this is about reaching these customers where they are, and we are indiscriminate of where they are. I don't care about any of these publishers. I just care about reaching my intended audience relative to that business objective of selling more tundras, right? Or selling more EVs, whatever it is, I don't care. At the end of the day, little preview here, announcement coming up, but we've now got direct access to to NBC Universal, and they're spot on peacock live sports. Great opportunity for dealers here, especially as we go into football season, right with Big 10 Network, NFL, etc. Just a little bit of a plug for a big announcement that's coming up shortly here. But great opportunity to, again, to expand the to expand the publisher ecosystem that we're already addressing. I'll

Paul J Daly  24:14  
tell you what that's the only one of the only places you'll find me personally on TV is live sports.

Cody Tomczyk  24:20  
Ever same, right? I'm the same same way, right? My kids, on the other hand, they're, they're consuming every, every publisher and platform,

Dane Tocco  24:29  
yeah, that's right. Funny. You say that, because the our region now, I mean, everything is switched to this type of media. The only thing we allow, from a traditional standpoint, is lives, LiFE sports, right? Wow, because you can't fast forward, you can't record it, that's right. No one wants

Paul J Daly  24:45  
to, yeah, so,

Cody Tomczyk  24:50  
so tying back in now, Paul, you know what I was pointing to just a second ago? Yes, my favorite part, why? Like, why? Why does the pre market deliver? Over time, and it's not just about reaching the customers, it's about the message, right? So we, we took that same 14 months worth of data, and what we did was we were tagging our creatives for different themes, right? You know, OEM, branding, dealer, branding offers and incentives. Were they lease offers, APR, off, MSRP, right? Was it about the inventory. And we just got done publishing this data at a sodium with you guys at the Conference in Baltimore, and the data is telling, but I would say not shocking, but it's important to think about it. You know, when you're applying to these strategies. And so when we say lift here, just to sort of appropriately quantify what we're talking about, lift is specific to store visits and to sales, right? So when we say lift, we're talking about not lifting views, not lifting impressions, but specifically lift to store visits, showroom ups in sales. So at the top of the funnel, what we have determined is that OEM content around vehicle features are going to be the highest performing creative sets that we can use. And here's why, this is an impressionable audience. They don't care about the offer. Yet, they're not in market. We're trying to get them in market, and the way we're going to get them in market is to tell the story about the vehicle, right? Why this vehicle is so great, right? All the bells and whistles, why it's going to change their life, why it matches their needs and their lifestyle and all these things. But not just branding the OEM for OEM sake, but wrapping around that on end cards with the dealer, right? We're your trusted source of information on this vehicle in particular. And when we do that, that set of creatives sees nearly a 59% lift in performance versus using all other creative sets.

Paul J Daly  26:56  
That makes sense. People haven't decided what they want yet.

Cody Tomczyk  26:59  
They're impressionable, right? Yeah. And now, when we bring them down into the funnel on the used car side, it's all about the VIN shocker, right? And what you're seeing is our dynamic video ad unit here, which pulls inventory directly from the VDP, where we can match it with what the customer is most interested in. And do this at scale, you could have 1000 customers see 1000 different VINs every single day, refreshed every six hours. So it's current inventory real time, right, which we talked about, you know, recon speed to market soon as it's on the website. We're now able to market that customer to that vehicle on the economy brands, right? So think you're, you know, Hondas and Chevys and Kias and so on. It's all about the offer. Right at the end of the day, the day, the offer is performing the best, and more importantly, lease offers. And this also shouldn't be a surprise, with vehicle affordability issues, payment driven offers are performing the best right now. And on average, you see a 51% lift in performance when you do so. And then finally, on the the luxury brand side, it's a combo lease offers coming back in vogue as everybody tries to rebuild their lease portfolio. Nice maturity Cliff happening right now, about half as many in q4 as in q2 nationwide lease offers. But it's also about not only vehicle features, but tech heavy features in particular, right? And when we do that, we see a 27% lift versus all other creative sets. Now here's the real key. How do you do this at scale, in real time, without having to ask the dealer? What do you want to do? And so what we do with the dealers, is Dana and I talk about this a lot, is we want to have all these creative sets ready to go. They're all there. They're always on, right? And when the offers get updated, we update the offers. But I don't want to go to Dane, or any of Dane's dealers, and say, Okay, let's make sure we segment out the pre market people, and they're going to get this video, and then the in market people, and they're going to get this video that's not scalable. That is where effective marketing goes to die. And so instead, what we want to do is we want to have it ready, so that when we do drive the customer from pre market to in market that created that they see automatically switches from vehicle feature to offers like we're going to do that on behalf of the dealer with whatever the most current offer is at that day at that time, so that they don't have to do it. And that's why it works, because it's always on. It's always running. And I don't have to ask the dealer, what do you want to run this month? What do you want to do? Tell me about your branding. No, no, no. All I want to do is, what vehicles do you want to feature? Cool.

Paul J Daly  29:34  
I'll take care of the rest. Done right speed,

Cody Tomczyk  29:36  
right? And that's where these things are affected.

Dane Tocco  29:39  
Alright,

Paul J Daly  29:40  
let's keep rolling. We're getting, getting, getting there. We might have some questions too. We're almost done

Cody Tomczyk  29:45  
here, which is perfect, right? So full funnel attribution, and this is where I think it's important to not only talk about the metrics, but more specifically how they work, right? So on the first box, right? With media metrics, these are the things that everybody has used for years, and by. The way most people are still using right? How many impressions, how many households that I target? What's my frequency, what's my views? You know?

Paul J Daly  30:06  
Yeah, all the stuff we said, we can make say whatever we wanted to say,

Cody Tomczyk  30:09  
exactly, right? Well, then you advance the ball down the funnel, right to to website metrics, right? How many website visits did I get? How many VDP views, how many leads and key events that I get again, all of this is tracked within the platform. About five and a half years ago is when we introduced physical attribution right store visit of the people who watched my ad, how many of those people physically showed up into my dealership? And we use data location partners like Foursquare as an example to be able to determine that down to a lat, long level in real time with very high confidence interval. And then finally, the metrics that matter at the end of the day, of the people who watch my ad, how many of them bought a car? How is this impacting my market share? How many of them bought a car from a competitor? Now we can make better decisions around what are we going to do in the future, right? How is this going to inform future campaigns? Which is going to be our dismount slide on this whole presentation? Is marketing attribution is only good if you do something with that information. I can't sell another car in July. July is done. What am I doing with that information to make tomorrow better? So quick highlight here on a Lithia store that Dane is obviously super familiar with, this is a case study with them that that speaks to exactly what we're talking about here. Right store calls. What do we need to prioritize? What is it that we are looking to accomplish, right? Let's put together a strategy where we can define the right audience. We can meet them to where their media consumption is right, and then at the end of the day, how did we do against that audience? Right? And as you see here, you don't see a single metric on the screen here on this case study about impressions and views and all that good stuff, right? What do you see? How many cars did they sell from the audience we went after with this investment. How many people physically showed up at the dealership? Is there anything else that matters to the dealer at the end of the day?

Paul J Daly  32:14  
I don't know. Dane, tell us No.

Jordan Cox  32:18  
Does it sell cars? I'm

Dane Tocco  32:19  
an operations guy, and I shoot it where it is. And hey, did you sell more cars? Did you service more cars? That's right, we got to redirect.

Paul J Daly  32:28  
So how do you how do you wait? If you go back to the last slide, Cody, you have a question. Dane, when you look at this slide, how are you processing, like, the different types of data that you get, and, like, you have a weighted scale where you're, I know at the end, it's like, how many did we sell? But you still have to make adjustments and changes, right? Like, to all these different things. So how do you break down this slide?

Dane Tocco  32:51  
Yeah, so, so what I do with with this here is, actually, I just recently did with some deals we have in Minnesota, is, you know, we say the the vendor can bring us a whole bunch of KPIs. So the the partner that we have out there brought a bunch of KPIs. Looked really great, right? So then we go into, okay, you're doing this stuff. You brought me these KPIs. Now we're, we're, where's all these KPIs coming from? And then I'm going to oversight it with, okay, now I want to say you're bringing people from here. This is real life of who's actually coming to my website. These are where my visitors are coming from. Then I'm going to take my market, pump in and pump out data and say, This is the zones that I'm losing the Bulls Business from, and this is who I'm losing them with. And now I want to take this data and really funnel in on, hey, this zone here is where I'm where I'm getting beat. So now I need to actually take this data and go even further nearer in and zone in right here to get my market share back. And you're doing that. You're not going to do that hardcore of the deep dive at a monthly but to what we said earlier, that's a that's a quarterly thing that we're going to we're going to dive deep in and say, Where's my market share taken from? And I could be gaining market share in a zone, but I could have two competitors gaining double what I'm gaining. So it's like, hey, I want, I want to gain more. And that's where we get very narrow in on hey, I can go out and spend $60,000 or I can spend $30,000 be cost conscious with for the dealership, but I can zone in on where I need to be, versus having this big blanket of advertising across the board. And then when you get down to the sales, I mean, it speaks for itself. It's like, Hey, you you got us to the right spot, the right zone, you hit the right customers, and we saw an increase in sales from it. There's certain zones and certain people you're going to get either way, especially from a lease retention, you're going to get them. So I don't need to advertise those advertising the people that I need to, that I need to grab, that I can't get right,

Paul J Daly  34:49  
right? That makes total sense. I know we have one last slide that we'll talk about. There you go, Cody, it's all you. Yeah,

Cody Tomczyk  34:58  
this is it, here, right? So, as Dave mentioned, right you bring all these metrics. And I think part of the challenge with optimization is, are we using the right metrics to make the right optimizations? Because impressions and clicks are one thing you can optimize, too. But does that really validate whether or not you had the right audience, whether or not you had the right placement, whether or not you had the right message. And so one, you want to build the plan right, like we talked about. Two, you want to unlock the full funnel right. Get outside of just doing the in market audiences and and create your own narrative to bring them down the funnel three, get the creative aligned with the funnel. This is one of the biggest challenges that we've been able to help dealers solve is go to market with a full funnel creative strategy, and you don't have to change it every day. Update the offers. Great. We're ready to rock the next day. Let's move

Dane Tocco  36:01  
and Cody. Oh, go ahead, Dave. So I will stress that and this piece, the reason, again, we said earlier is we're heavy into the operation side of things. Now you can have all this stuff great and it works. And we talked about this point even heavily, like third party vendors, your auto traders, or CarGurus, if everything is aligned and you're still not selling a service in cars. There's something else there. So that's where we're very vocal, with our with our close partners, like force and other partners that we have of Hold on, are we merchandise correctly? Are we priced correctly? Are we moving? Are we are we to market the right way? So there's a lot of internal factors on the store side too, that that we we're very upfront with them, and no GM wants the marketing guy telling them how to run the store, but sometimes we gotta call out the obvious and say, Listen, we're doing everything right. Everything is aligned, but this is wrong, and I need, we need to work together to make sure that we can continue this, this loop here. All right,

Paul J Daly  36:56  
as we, as we come to a close here, Dane, I want to hear from you, and then Cody from you on the way through Dane, what is one thing you would say to a dealer and operator who is ready to dip their toe into this level of sophistication with their marketing? What should they do? First,

Dane Tocco  37:13  
I would say, have an open mind and, more importantly, work with a partner that the relationship is there, because let's, let's call a spade a spade. Any there's a lot of marketing companies that can do similar things, but if you don't have, if you don't have one that is going to be open and honest with you, that you can be open and honest back have a really good relationship, working relationship, where you can build out these plans and communicate properly, it's hard to make it successful, but have an open mind, because your life is probably going to get blasted a complete 180 of everything you've you've always done in the past. We're going to switch it on you, wow. And you have to just kind of trust that, that, hey, it's going to go in the right direction, and it's and most importantly, it's going to take time. This isn't it's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen 30 days. We got to give it time. You can make slight adjustments in 30 days. You can make slight adjustments in 60 but really you got to give it you know that three to six month period to really see the big results from everything. So

Paul J Daly  38:16  
I have have an open mind, find someone you can trust, to work with and deploy some patience. Cody, I don't know how you're going to top

Cody Tomczyk  38:26  
that. I'll tell you it's, I wish all of our partners were like, Dane, right. We have very open and honest conversations, man. It's like, Hey, I got this problem. Can you help me solve it? Yes, hey, I got a problem with something going on in one of the stores you're working with, can you dive in? Yes, that's the difference, right and right? You guys say it's all about people, right? At the end of the day long, people more than you love cars, right? It's the same thing here. And the advice I'd give the dealers who are looking to jump in on this as a strategy is to Dane's point, you need to have an open mind, meaning, don't allow everything you thought to prevent you from seeing a new opportunity to go after right? That can sort of limit the potential do this to solve specific problems, right? This is not just advertising to have a line item that says, Yep, I'm doing, right? I need to sell more tundras. Great. Let's sell more tundras, right? I need to you're a stellantis dealer. I need to sell everything right. Help me sell cars right at the end of the day and and then give it time, but measure what works right, like ask the hard questions of, how do I know this is working or not? And you should be able to know whether it's working or not on are you selling more of what you sought to sell? Right? It's that simple.

Paul J Daly  39:45  
There you go, Cody with force and the new product drive. Thank you so much for sharing and educating our community today. Dane, thanks for so much for giving some of your time. I know you have a lot a lot to do in this pretty, pretty I don't know what the. Call it right now. It's, it's not an uncertain time. It's like, what is it? It's just we're in the rapids still.

Dane Tocco  40:05  
Yeah, no. Thanks for having us. All right, we're going to flip it back to Anne Marie.

Ann-Marie Johnson  40:14  
All right, everyone that's going to do it for today. Thank you for being here for another a sodium edge webinar. We were talking about connecting cars and customers through advanced streaming media and audio with our friends from forced marketing. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day. You.

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