Sizing Up the EV Storyline, International More Than Cars, Google Gotcha

Kyle Mountsier: 0:14

Good Morning Today I've got sitting next to me the infamous the wild the crazy Michael Cirillo horses dealer playbook. We're talking Eevee storylines more than cars and Gotcha. People really want to know who it is and who Id they stopped with talking this morning. We're talking. We're talking, you know what I love? I don't I don't know if if the people can't see this, if they're not listening. You are wearing a very OG shirt today. It's the no crisis can win shirt that's like throwback old school soda vibes, but also, always extremely relevant. Welcome to the show, Cirillo.

‍Michael Cirillo: 0:56

Hey, glad to be here. Thanks for having me on. And, you know, this is one of my favorite shirts. Yeah, it's breezy, the materials good. So So for like those hot Texas days that feel like we're in crisis, because you can fry an egg on the sidewalk, and just everything. Everything,

Kyle Mountsier: 1:15

no heat crisis can win promise. I love it. I love it. Man, we're getting into it. The team, I'll tell you what we were just chatting beforehand, the team is releasing like, just a plethora, if I may. content from ASOTU CON, whether it be short form stuff on our LinkedIn channel, or on our asoto YouTube, which you can find at us. So tube ASOTU dot B, E, we've got now the mini keynote sessions up. So a bunch of our industry partners brought dealers together to sit on stages, talk about what they're doing in collaboration, how they are leaning into the partnership mentality on how to go to market, whether it be go to market strategies or operations strategy. So all of those are live. One of my favorite ones was I got to sit down. I was supposed to be Brian Kramer and Joe Bassam. And then all of a sudden Robert Hollinshead ends up on stage. And it got totally sideways. It was great.

Michael Cirillo: 2:24

It's been, I mean, at time of recording the pod today, it's been a couple of weeks since ASOTU. CON and the question that keeps rolling through my mind as I try and make sense of ASOTU CON is what the heck just happened.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:43

I honestly it took me to like Tuesday to write some level of a post on LinkedIn like I didn't I you know, I post pretty often on LinkedIn, it took my brain like a solid week and a half just to go What am I going to say about this thing? Because it was so even for me very different, you know? Yeah,

Michael Cirillo: 3:03

I mean, it's one thing to be on this side of it be in the weeds to watch the asoto team maneuver and plan and prep and then execute, in my opinion, a flawless experience for attendees. The content is just off the rails. So I mean, if you haven't scrolled through the asoto socials yet to consume some of it, especially for those of you that couldn't be there. I mean, what the heck just happened? That's as far as I've gotten. That's why I haven't

Kyle Mountsier: 3:35

I like it. Well, hey, speaking of what just what that just happened. Segue. So uh, what the heck just happened or is happening is going on continually in our industry, specifically the first five months of this year, despite the recent headlines about an Eevee slowdown though, the overall electric vehicle market seems like it still is growing. So there's a slowdown and pace but there's so growth while sales numbers vary across brands, the industry's progress continues, with certain automakers experiencing significant growth. automakers like Hyundai and Ford have seen year over year Evie sales growth, grow 56% and 86%, respectively. Also, Hyundai GM and Ford are on pace to sell more than 100,000 EVs for the first time in the calendar year previously, only Tesla had been able to do that. And what we're seeing what analysts are seeing in the market and Cox automotive has a big report out is that because of a slowdown in, in Tesla, in particular, and no model refreshes coming in the year, there's a gap in the Eevee market that a lot of these other manufacturers are filling and so even though we're seeing a decline in the growth rate, still seeing significant growth Um political polarization is still impacting Evie adoption. We kind of covered this earlier in the week. But we're 63% of of polies I don't even know if that's a word have cited the Chinese dominance as a as a growing concern. Stephanie Valdes streety, the director of industry insights at Cox automotive said, we're still seeing growth in demand just not at the same pace for every brand, as you know, kind of a broken market and interesting story that we're still trying to figure out this year.

Michael Cirillo: 5:38

What I heard you just say is invest in Tesla, now's a good time to invest in Tesla.

Kyle Mountsier: 5:46

Right, a little bit of a break in the noise job. Look, I

Michael Cirillo: 5:51

mean, we've talked about this on past episode of the podcast, like we I think we are out of the Oh EVs are great for the environment narrative that has shifted, we've graduated, and it's now we're just into, just accept this, it could be a viable product. Right? It's, like I said, in our household, my 15 year old as he starts to learn to drive will have no reference point other than MeV, which is wild to me. Well, and

Kyle Mountsier: 6:22

I think the, what we're starting to realize, and what all these OEMs are realizing is that it's just it's like a product line. It's an option that we can have in the product line, instead of just being like the only product line and they'll still be political forces in play over the next, you know, whatever. 11 years till when everybody wants to see things go 100% Electric, but the OEMs listening to the dealers, isn't the consumer, just seeing or hearing like, oh, we have these multiple product lines, similar to different models. It's just a different way to build a model as a product line.

Michael Cirillo: 7:03

Yeah, you're seeing Yeah, I love that the product ideation deepens like a finely crafted Nike shoe. It's like, hey, not everybody's gonna want the dead air max p 90s. Like Cirilo. Some people still want to rock the Jordans and the Air Force what like you need different lineups? And that's the way I'm perceiving it in my mind. Yep, exactly.

Kyle Mountsier: 7:29

Speaking of how we perceive the industry in our minds, it was a little bit of a stretch on the Segway. It's a little bit of a stretch, but we got it. Automotive News just ran the story and it is like all up in the more than cars mentality in our in our world. Vermont dealer faith, Mom Ma is not only succeeding in the automotive business, but also giving back to his homeland Iberia. Recently, his efforts have led to the creation of a new school providing much needed educational resources emigrated to the US in 2004, began his career in the car business soon after. And he's currently a dealer constructing a 37,000 square foot Toyota Ford dealership in Westminster, Westminster, Vermont. He's also at the same time embarking on a construction project project halfway across the world. Building a sixth class classroom, elementary school in eastern Nigeria, where there were basically 200 students studying in dilapidated two dilapidated two rooms school with no roof. And they have funded this project themselves after struggling to get like tax deductible donations or anything like that, so the new school includes a well for water, a, a totally different look and feel of a school than what the students would typically get. He said in a quote, I look at it as something to carry on my father's legacy. I decided to build it for the children, because they are the leaders of tomorrow. Cake. You can't get

Michael Cirillo: 9:10

better. Take that, Mr. Beast.

Kyle Mountsier: 9:14

Right. Man, I, I gotta tell you this story. This is. So I was I was on a plane Tuesday night. About 40% of the time when I'm on a plane, I get that you know the talker next to you. And this person was excited to talk to me. And so I was leaning in. And I started telling all these stories of like, the more than cars things, the things that have been on the show or the things that I know that are happening in the industry. And you could see this lady's eyes just kind of like get all googly eyed like I had no clue that people in the automotive industry did these things. Hmm. And these are the stories that every day get exposed in our into street like dealers, building stores, but also building schools for children in Nigeria.

Michael Cirillo: 10:07

You're not? Yeah, what's crazy to me is this, that the giving and community involvement is so commonplace in our industry that we forget to talk about it. We forget to think, Wait, I am doing that. And I'm not sitting here like, oh, self praise and this and that. I think it's just an indicator of how commonplace the giving actually is that it's, it's just overlooked.

Kyle Mountsier: 10:35

Yeah, that's, that's a really interesting insight, because it's like, oh, no, that's just a part of who we are. That we need to shout. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep. Speaking of shouting stuff from the rooftops I'm so

Michael Cirillo: 10:49

glad you used that. I'm so glad I was like he's got to say something with this shout. Oh, man, Kyle is the king of segways. Speaking of shouting, and shouting from the rooftops boy has the SEO community been shouting stuff from the rooftops of Sweden Yellen. Of you're aware, Google has confirmed the authenticity of about 2500 leaked internal documents revealing details about the data, it collects and potentially uses in its search ranking algorithm. And I mean, for those of you in the marketing industry, especially in automotive, have we not pontificated over the ranking signals over the last 20 years, and Google has kept them all close to their chest by the leaked documents reveal that Google tracks data such as clicks and Chrome user activity, which the company previously stated, does not influence search rankings. So here we have this like little back and forth tug of war. However, it's unclear if this data is used for training purposes or in the search algorithm itself. The the impact of this leak for the SEO Marketing and publishing industry is due to the sensitive nature of search ranking is, in my opinion, yet to be seen. I mean, is it sharing anything we didn't already know, having said that, a quote in the verge says, we would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search based on out of context outdated or incomplete information. And that is directly from Google spokesperson, Davis Thompson. So this, Kyle,

Kyle Mountsier: 12:37

this is it's shocking to me, I will say like, we have learned that these big companies are great at quote, unquote, leaks, right? There, it's no surprise that Apple puts patents in particular places, has, you know, different different manufacturers in their supply chain have little bit too much access, like these things have become commonplace for large companies at some level. I also, you know, in reading I've been, I've read so much yesterday on the plane about this, you start to like, look at all of the signals that have been, quote, unquote, exposed. It's stuff that as marketers, we've known for a significant amount of time, it's it's not like a massive surprise to the community. It does confirm some things that that people maybe were questionable about whether or not these things were impacting search rankings, I think the the most interesting thing that might come out of this is, I can't wait for the first person that uses Geminis 1 million context window to analyze the 2500 page document and GitHub repo to write a purpose built article to see if they can like they can start to rank quickly. We'll see if we'll, we'll see if someone can figure that out. And if that's like there's like a reverse engineering, you know, practice here. But the other the other thing is like they're changing these algorithms every day. So even keeping up with it, like a document that was leaked a week ago, is I don't think, you know,

Michael Cirillo: 14:25

yeah, I mean, and and specific to the dealer community. What I think we're seeing, especially on the back of the march core algorithm update, which sent shockwaves through the industry is pay attention to your OEM certified website that's filled with programmatic content that spans 1700 2000 3000 other dealers because you may just be getting flagged for spammy content and you may see a sharp decrease in ranked pages in indexed pages. And those are the types of things that I'm kind of tracking. I mean, this is cool. These leaked documents are essentially saying, what I felt was the number one ranking signal anyways, which is give the online user a better experience, let's say when yep, that's what they want. There's going to be all sorts of to your kind of, dare I say, conspiracy ideas, though. I'm saying that you didn't say it is. Maybe this is just another way to get the overthinker is to overthink so that they can de index even more crappy content.

Kyle Mountsier: 15:38

I like you couldn't have said it better. If I couldn't have said it better if I tried. So, hey, we took a journey around a whole bunch of stuff today from EVs to more than cars to Google craziness, and we thanks for taking that journey with us. Appreciate you being a part of the community. Please go make today about more than cars.

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