EV Tariffs In Effect, Auto Ads Blitz the NFL, Beast Mode Business Playbook

Paul J Daly: 0:03

Good morning. I'm gonna get the date right today. It's Friday, everybody, September 27 just to be clear, we have a hurricane that come in, came in. We're talking about EV tariffs, as in the NFL, and Mr. Beast's playbook.

‍Kyle Mountsier: 0:18

There you go. We have a copy to answer your question

Paul J Daly: 0:22

before I started live, right before we went live, I was like, you were in a hoodie. And then the music started playing,

Kyle Mountsier: 0:29

I got a hoodie look. Well, one we're getting the outskirts of this wild hurricane that we'll talk about in just a second, but we're getting the outskirts of it so it's like, it's cooled down. It's a little bit of rain. We didn't have rain for like, three weeks, and now it's rained for four days straight. So, yeah, I got the hoodie I have.

Paul J Daly: 0:49

I have, like, this little sweater thing going today. It's got butter thing, it's cool. It's got a cardigan.

Unknown: 0:58

I feel a little bit when I put on something like this. I'm like, I

Paul J Daly: 1:01

guess I'm at that point in my life now where this is the garbage choice. Yeah, I'm like, I'm channeling my inner Mr. Rogers. No Look. My

Kyle Mountsier: 1:09

wife calls me Mr. Rogers because I got my little shoe, you know, home office. I got my shoes.

Unknown: 1:15

I'm off when I walk out. Yeah,

Paul J Daly: 1:19

I'm the same way. I don't like just sitting at a desk working in like, socks. I just, I don't know, I can't do it. Can't

Kyle Mountsier: 1:25

do it. That's so funny. I

Paul J Daly: 1:26

didn't know that about you. I'm exactly the same way

Kyle Mountsier: 1:30

from home. And I throw shoes on when I come upstairs, like,

Paul J Daly: 1:33

yeah, it's like, We're not sitting here doing fantasy football and working definitely not, definitely not. I don't know. I don't know if you do. I don't know if you do. Oh, man. Well, a lot's going on. The biggest thing going on is the hurricane that's affected 3.5 million people are still without power. Damages, obviously still being assessed as the storm, you know, hit hit Florida. Now it's making its way through Georgia, the Carolinas. It's on its way to hit Nashville. And so if you're dial I know a lot of dealerships have closed, some said they were going to reopen today. We'll see, I guess, what happens. But if you're dealing with some hard times, like, lean on your people, we're here for you however we can. And if you have the ability and you're in the auto industry, we know you do this anyway, but it's a great opportunity to serve the community, yeah, for sure, we'll see. I mean, you can, I just don't trust the Weather Channel.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:26

I mean, this is,

Paul J Daly: 2:27

this is a legit category four.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:30

Yeah, right. It hit. It hit hard. I mean, I saw some of the videos and images, but, you know, yeah, but,

Paul J Daly: 2:36

I mean, like, the lead up, right? Because, like, it could just be, like, a little, a little shower, and they got a guy faking that he's being blown over out there, not enough, but this one's super Yeah, and it's alright. It's like, late, late hit Atlanta too. Yeah, it hit Atlanta. And, yeah, I

Kyle Mountsier: 2:52

mean, I think it was, I think they were saying it was at least a tropical storm up in Atlanta, still, so pretty

Paul J Daly: 3:02

lesson. Said it was crazy in Atlanta for a bit. He was there, but all good hope. Yeah, Atlanta can handle that. But you know what? It can't handle 16th of an inch of snow. It could dump five inches of rain. No problem.

Unknown: 3:17

No problem.

Paul J Daly: 3:19

I'm so not looking forward to this part of the travel season. This is, oh

Kyle Mountsier: 3:23

yeah, they're getting all, you're right, yeah. Every single plane flight is, like, that was a little chippy,

Paul J Daly: 3:30

yeah. And then Syracuse is like, oh, we gotta de ice again.

Unknown: 3:34

Oh, there it is. Always,

Paul J Daly: 3:36

we'll get through it. We'll get through it. Um, let's actually, I want to, I want to, I want to talk about something here. Tell the people about the asot. Grab something on the other side of my office. Okay, okay. We're doing an asot edge webinar next Friday, October 4, at 2pm

Kyle Mountsier: 3:53

all about keeping the ship on course by aligning marketing and store processes. We're gonna be talking to wikimotive and Tommy Car Auto Group about some of the stuff that they've done to keep the ship on. Course, you're not going to want to miss it. You can go to asotu com, scroll down, boom, register. Make sure you're there. Hang out with us on a Friday, and if you can't make it, you register. You get the link afterwards. Oh,

Paul J Daly: 4:14

beautiful thing. I made it back. That was good, savvy production from Nathan, our head of production, who just cut to the side screen. I took my ears out, I went over there, came back. It looks like I never left. So this is, this is our sample print shirt. Oh, so we got all kinds of graphics on this car shirt. This is where we test, you know, we have these earrings, yeah, and test theories. But this one is not a test. We we've just started offering custom love people more than you love car T shirts branded with the dealership. And you know, beaver Toyota made the post where we did, you know, five, 600 all of their people, sales, service, office, we have different color combos. It's amazing. And this is in production today. Oh boy for our friends at.

Kyle Mountsier: 5:00

Give it to at all Riverhead Mazda.

Unknown: 5:04

Look at that. Yep,

Paul J Daly: 5:07

all of their rocking these. In this one, we have a nice kind of like Mazda silver. Love people with a white Riverhead Mazda. Thank you. Our good friend, Michael Lutz, is how you say it actually ski? Look at that key.

Unknown: 5:21

Yeah, it's, it's,

Paul J Daly: 5:24

and so hey, if you're interested in getting custom dealership, you can let us just, just hit us up. Yeah, send us an email to crew, C, R, E, W, at a soda.com we have volume pricing, and we'll mock up what your store looks like on there. And I was thinking when I was coming in this morning, what a great Christmas gift. Yeah, we're talking about Christmas gift. But everyone's always like, what do we do for our team? What

Kyle Mountsier: 5:45

an awesome way to, like, give everybody all these wonderful shirts. That's a great idea, but

Paul J Daly: 5:50

put your orders in early, because, like, you know what? We're not a big don't get

Kyle Mountsier: 5:53

real. We're not a we need a full we need the heads up. But we're getting there. We're

Paul J Daly: 5:57

getting we're getting there. Speaking of getting there. Hey, now I didn't see this talked about anywhere in the news, but this is news to us. The new tariffs, the ones that we've been talking about that initially were part of the Trump administration, they put in place in the Biden industry. Administration leaned into it. They go into effect today. Today is the day, whoa, the EV the 100% tariff on Chinese EV EVs goes into effect. It affects 14 categories of Chinese goods, not just EVs, including 50% tariff on solar cells, 25% on key materials like steel, aluminum, lithium ion batteries. Basically, the tariffs are expected in 2025 to increase on electronics such as laptops and cell phones. So like this gets heat no but it starts with the EVS folks, Chinese. EVS only account for 2% of us. EV imports, and they've threatened retaliation, labeling the tariffs of bullying and escalating, you know, the global, global trade war, not a real war. Trade War. White House economic advisor Lael Brainard said the tariff on vehicles Does, does reflect a significant cost advantage that Chinese EVs have to use the to dominate the market and flood the market potentially with Chinese EVs. So this has been the topic of conversation. It dropped out of the news once they made the decision. And now it's the 27th and, like, I don't know what happens. What

Kyle Mountsier: 7:27

happens is, you definitely don't see BYD coming anytime soon, right? Like, they're just, they're just looking at us over from Mexico, being like, you know, that was cool and stuff, but we're not coming over there, so you can't get cheap EVs from us.

Paul J Daly: 7:43

Well, Europe's about. Europe is working on legislation right now to do the same thing. It was supposed to go in effect right away, but apparently it hasn't, like, delayed a couple of weeks. I know it, yeah,

Kyle Mountsier: 7:53

which is also wild. But this, I this one, is definitely going to have more impact on regular goods, you know, key materials, lithium ion batteries, at you know, the semiconductors where, you know, when we look at our like, light electronics, we're going to have a lot more impact. But this is going to, you know that 2% is definitely not going to grow quickly. And when you look at Chinese manufacturing, they figured out how to do low, low cost EVs. And so we're just not going to see that in the US market for a bit longer. Most likely, yeah,

Paul J Daly: 8:27

I mean, and I don't know if you know, did, I don't know if you noticed this, there's like, an election gonna happen, like six weeks. Oh, really. Notice that one of those things I know that may or may not have something to do with it, what it could after November, it could impact this for sure, could potentially speaking of impact sport, automakers are definitely ramping up their advertising spend during the NFL season this year, after a few years of reduced activity, brands like Toyota, Hyundai and some Detroit automakers betting big on live sports, especially NFL games, to capture that very dedicated consumer attention increased by 17% year over year in the last two seasons, and is now keeping growing. Last NFL season, 44% of automotive ad spend on national TV was dedicated to NFL programming. That's amazing, compared to 31% in other areas. Toyota is now the official partner of the NFL, and GM plans to boost ad spending by 400 million in the second half. That's in the second half. I mean, like of the season of the next few months to promote new vehicle launches, they actually have some really great stuff to talk about, the Silverado, EVs and all that NFL broadcast. I mean, you can't beat the NFL traffic, 17 point 9 million viewers on average at the Super Bowl, drawing 123 point 7 million viewers. That's that's about

Kyle Mountsier: 9:52

everybody. I'm telling you. It's just a cash cow, like it just keeps printing money. We love our football and. The advertisers know it, you know, like I there's no way to get around it. And now you see all the n, i, L deals happen at the college level, right? It just trickles down into that. I mean, it is just insane. And I think that the biggest thing for for me here is, is look at what your manufacturer is doing. See if you can parlay off coattail that sucker, coattail that sucker. A lot of people, a lot of people don't make direct buys on, you know, like post ad runs, right? Toyota OEM run, parlay that into tier three run, maybe in the next commercial break, or even, or even immediately after it, especially if you have a great brand story to tell and it connects to the OEM like that. That parlay, if you are running linear advertising, is a really great way to increase eyeballs on your brand and your dealership.

Paul J Daly: 10:50

You could, Couldn't have said it better myself. You know, I wonder, like some of my favorite Super Bowl ads from car companies have been the Hyundai ads. I think small Park is one of my favorites ever, but Angela zapetta, who is the CMO, she's not with Hyundai anymore, so we'll see what they come up with on the Super Bowl. Did you see where she went? She's the global brand director for x now,

Kyle Mountsier: 11:12

wow. Did

Unknown: 11:13

you know that

Paul J Daly: 11:15

it's like, I think that means that we're like, one step removed now from Elon Musk on multiple fronts well, but

Kyle Mountsier: 11:21

if you think of it like he knew all about her, right? Like it's not like they weren't paying attention. So it makes sense how that connection kind of happened. I'm sure I know, but

Paul J Daly: 11:30

I'd like some automotive influence up in the social media world. It's my thing. Speaking of the social media world, all right, and the week on a good strong two segues in a row.

Kyle Mountsier: 11:41

Look, Mr. Beast, if you don't know him, where you've been. YouTube's biggest star is now making waves as a thought leader in the tech world. He leaked a workplace guide. His name is obviously Jimmy Donaldson, and it has caught the attention of a bunch of Silicon Valley execs, sparking conversations about leadership, productivity and intense work expectations. It's a 36 page guide that Investor Mark Cohen said, it feels like it's written by a person rather than a corporation. So so definitely a personal type feel letter for sure, emphasizing hiring a players who are obsessive, coachable, and the best in their field. He expects workers to be laser focused, demanding radical accountability and a no excuses approach to their work. Um, it recently has just been compared to this new founder mode, a hands on management style popular in the tech industry. Um, while some are praising in its intensity, others criticize it for promoting a grueling work culture. Yeah. So, you know, yeah, we're gonna have two sides of the coin, but the results definitely prove out something.

Paul J Daly: 12:50

So if you I, I read it, I read it this morning. You can go to the show notes today, and the link is in the show notes, and you can just download the PDF. So you should do it because it's an interesting read. It gives you an insight into just how, like the best social media YouTuber in the world thinks about engagement, because they actually some graphs and charts like, Hey, this is how we tell whether something's good or not. They talk about the first minute of the video. They talk about some things, about lighting in the first minute of the video. But a lot of it, most of it is about this culture, and it definitely seems obsessive, and you can understand how it reflects Jimmy's personality. And he said, basically, this is an interesting thing in there. He said, he said, really, the goal is to come up with concepts that get me excited. He's like, because if I'm not excited to do it, it's gonna come across in the content. So I think I like that. He's not afraid to say, like, hey, like, this is built on my instinct, and if I can't get excited about it, then we're going to keep moving. Also, obviously a vulnerability, but the brand is sure he is the brand. So yeah, I mean the two sides of the coin, grueling work culture. I mean, people get to choose whether or not they want to work there. And I think this document makes it very clear, front and center, this is a high intensity, high accountability culture.

Kyle Mountsier: 14:07

What, what I say, what I would say, I appreciate about it. Appreciate about it is, is he picked a lane. He said, This is who we are. Yeah, this is who works here, and this is how we do things, right? And if you can, as a business owner, a manager, communicate that clearly over and over to your employees and the entire team, like, that's what you weed out, like, who it is, right? This is it's similar to ideal customer profile. If you can determine who your ideal customer profile is, you might get some people saying, No, but that's okay if you're super strong and resilient with that customer. Same thing with your employee and your employees and team. Yeah, there's,

Paul J Daly: 14:45

there's a lot of good in there. You should read it these, they have one principle called pushing through No. And he goes give examples. Just because you get a no, that does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that No is the answer. And it's just that is startup, entrepreneurial. Resistant, uh, persistence reminds me a lot of the persistence of a lot of the people we know, and why they've been able to build businesses that take care of so many people. You go take care of some people. It's Friday. We got a good Saturday ahead.

Unknown: 15:22

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