The Future of Car Dealership Marketing: Advertising Insights from a Reformed Car Guy (Appearance on Dealer Talk Podcast)

Herb Anderson: What up? Welcome to another episode of the dealer talk podcast. This is your host, Herb Anderson. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We have an amazing guest, none other than Mr. Tim Rowe. He's been on the show before, but it's been a minute and we're going to be talking to you guys about how you can leverage marketing, traditional marketing, uh, out of home in particular in 2024. So you can have some more wins. Tim, thank you so much for doing this, man. We're really, really stoked to have you on the program. I think this is going to be an amazing conversation. But before we get into it, let's go and talk about our sponsors. Four Eyes. Folks, I've told you about Four Eyes. Four Eyes is amazing. It's a great, great, great product. If you haven't done so already, go to the show notes, click the link, start that 60-day absolutely free trial. Again, 60 days absolutely free. You have nothing to lose. Absolutely nothing to lose. Go to the show notes, click the link, sign up for the trial, try it out. You will not regret it. Tim, what's up? Welcome back. welcome back thank you for having me back there's so much to talk about i'm excited yeah dude i'm excited about this conversation um i was you know i was thinking about man who can i have to talk about some of the things that i really want to talk about because typically it's all digital and i was like oh i gotta have tim back on this is the perfect dude to have on the show so
Tim Rowe: Man. And, and, you know, to, to kind of disclaimer in the front end of this is like, I'm a reformed digital marketing car guy. So the perspective is it, I can't even, some of the words that will come out of my mouth today are things that five years ago I didn't believe to be true. And I've seen the light and I'm excited to share some of that with dealers who could benefit. So.

Herb Anderson: Yeah, I think this is the perfect conversation to have for what's ahead of us here in this new year after coming out of such a high of success and growth and profitability. And so this is going to be a good one. We kicked things off with an intro. I know you've done it before, but I feel like your evolution has been one that merits us talking about it again. So just kick us off with telling us about you, man, and what you've been up to since the last time you were on the show.

Tim Rowe: Yeah, it's been a lot of fun since the last time I was on the show. I now have a podcast that's four years old. I think, uh, probably the last time we chatted, I did not have a podcast. I didn't know anything about doing a podcast. I particularly didn't know anything really about the, the category or the advertising channel that I'm most passionate about these days, which is out of home advertising. It's taken me on a journey to working for a startup. We went zero to 10 million in two years, went from six to 60 people. We blew up the rocket. The podcast has won a bunch of awards. We just cracked the Apple top 20 US business news podcast for the first time. Wow. It's been an incredible, incredible journey. But specifically, I guess how I got here was really the car business. The car business got me to where I am today. I started out working in a parts department, delivering parts. I thought I was like Paul Walker in Fast and the Furious 1, but I didn't have It was a Ford F-250 with rubber floors, crank windows, and an AM radio. I was delivering brake parts and things like that. But that was my first touch in the car business and continued through the fixed up side of the house was in the Marine Corps, came back from the Marine Corps, said, what can I do that will support my family while giving me the opportunity to go back to school? Car business is a great place to do that because of the flexible hours. So went back on the sales side, went to an agency, sold millions of dollars worth of online and traditional TV, radio, direct mail advertising to dealers. Never bought or sold a billboard in my life. And now I have a podcast about billboards. So that's kind of row in a nutshell.

Herb Anderson: So let's kick it off there, man. Let's start with that. I'm very interested in your particular story, because at least you started in a niche that I'd never heard any podcasting ever being done. So that must have been a decision, right? Because for me, for example, I was listening to my favorite podcast, which is The Dealer Playbook with Michael Cirillo. I think that podcast is incredible. Um, and that whole journey of listening to his kind of inspired me to do, um, this one. But I mean, there's a lot of people in our space doing podcasting, but in your space, it's like, do you, is there, I mean, I'm not really familiar, but is there any, any other podcasts that, or are you completely alone in that, in that sector?

Tim Rowe: So it's kind of cool. When I started the podcast, I asked a colleague of mine, I was selling billboards in a small part of Eastern Pennsylvania. If anyone's familiar with the Lehigh Valley, I was selling billboards in the Lehigh Valley. And I said to my colleague, I was like, There's got to be a podcast about this stuff. Just think about how I like to learn. I've got an hour ride into the office. This is pre-COVID. Hour ride into the office, hour ride home. I love listening to content. I was like, there's got to be a podcast about out of home. And she was like, no, not really. It's the pen and paper industry. It's really old fashioned. There's not. So knowing nothing about out of home advertising, that's billboards, wrapped buses, that sort of thing. knowing nothing about out of home and nothing about podcasting. I was like, I'm going to start a podcast about out of home. Um, because that seems like a good way to synthesize knowledge and, and spread that across. I thought my audience was 11 people. I thought it was the other salespeople in my office. I didn't know it would be a hundred countries around the world, you know, topping Apple podcast charts, um, and having as much global impact as it has, but it's, it's been a really incredible journey. That's all now. And now there's a bunch of podcasts that now there's like six podcasts about out of home, which, which goes to further validate, right. The first, when you have those follow on podcasts and they have their own kind of unique spin or take on it, it validates you as the first in the category. So it's been a lot of fun and we've inspired some, some other great creators that we inspired a, an award show for billboards in Nigeria.

Herb Anderson: That's awesome, dude. Wow.

Tim Rowe: Which is so cool. That's so cool. Those are cool DMs to get like, Hey, I've been listening to your podcast since it was on crackly audio. And because of that, you've inspired us to lead our industry in our country. What? I never thought that that would be the impact it's had. But yeah, so far, so good.

Herb Anderson: That's awesome, man. Congrats, bro. It's amazing. I've talked about this on the show before, but to do something like this, at any capacity, because I started doing it in an office in my house. I remember having a cardboard box around my mic, which I learned later was a wrong move because that's not the way to isolate sound. But I didn't know anything about anything.

Tim Rowe: You got to figure out how to do a podcast. while doing the podcast, like that's also part of the mechanics is figuring out how to do a podcast.

Herb Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. I had a book, uh, podcasting for dummies and that's kind of what I, that's literally what I used.

Herb Anderson: So good. So good. And now we, we have studio cameras, a producer. It's like, you know, like the journey, right? So, uh, let it grow.

Tim Rowe: You let it evolve.

Herb Anderson: It's just,

Herb Anderson: But to do something like this in the past, it would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars. And now you have these mediums. It's free. You can just create the content and do your thing.

Tim Rowe: What a great opportunity for dealers, too. Something I've thought about, too, for dealers specifically around podcasting as a mechanism is that you don't necessarily… I wouldn't listen to my local Honda dealers podcast, let's just be honest. But what do we know about podcasts? The SEO value is obscene. Right. Obscene. Why? Because as soon as you distribute over all of these pipes for podcasts, you're using their domain authority. So if I'm the local Honda dealer or I'm the local used car dealer, I would start thinking about podcasting as a distribution mechanism. Give me a five minute interview with the customer that just bought the car. Hey, Herb, what was it like buying a car here? It wasn't too hard, was it? No. And would you recommend someone came back down and tried this again? And guess what? I'm going to upload that as a podcast. I'm going to push it out over the pipes. And now I'm going to absolutely dominate local SEO for Honda your town client names right like you will be the absolute powerhouse dealer i want to see someone test that i think that that's a huge opportunity plus dealer to release a podcast the format is you're absolutely correct in the format lends itself very well to like incentives and deals of the month.

Herb Anderson: And that's a format that could be more effective if you get the audience, of course, to talk about all the things that are happening for that month versus trying to cram all that information on a long form post on Facebook, for instance. You know what I mean?

Tim Rowe: So interesting, right? The outro to that five-minute customer testimonial, right? It's a customer testimonial. It's talking about how great it was buying a car here, servicing my car here, whatever. And then at the end of that is an outro of, yeah, going on now is our end of year discount bonus sale. Come on down.

Herb Anderson: You can cram all that information right there and let the customers know of all these things that are happening.

Tim Rowe: There's some digital agencies listening right now that are like, stop, that's too good of an idea. Don't say anything more.

Herb Anderson: Anyways, Matt listen, we know that there's been some crazy Good times, which is weird because I remember when this whole pandemic everything I was nervous I was like, I don't know what's gonna happen like, you know dealers are They're probably gonna cancel services for the foreseeable future You can't even go to work at a dealership because their clothes are not hiring or they didn't know what they were they were laying people off so it was like You know, a little bit scary there. And then, you know, two, three months into it, it turned into this thing where it became a very good thing within a bad situation, right? And now we're at the tail end of it, and there's a lot of panic again, right? Market correction. Yeah, exactly. Which is funny to me, and I've said this to a couple of the GMs that I consult with. I was like, dude, we knew this day was coming. I don't know why everybody's surprised and freaking out. We knew.

Tim Rowe: We just printed one third of the money supply in the last three years and gave it away to a bunch of people who spent it on cars. Eventually the music has to stop.

Herb Anderson: Yeah.

Tim Rowe: So let's, uh, let's get scrappy. Let's get smart. Let's get lean. Yes. Efficient. Let's let's really, you know, I think this is a great opportunity for dealers to, to make some of those hard decisions that maybe we didn't have to make the last three years. Where do we cut? Where do we. Where do we trim the fat and really get intentional about the business? It's going to be an interesting couple of years ahead.

Herb Anderson: For sure. And it's good, right? Because it's like the survival of the fittest, right? The market always autocorrects and the people that are not meant to be in it, they shouldn't be in it, right? So that's a good thing. But there are a lot of dealers out there that are starting to plan for 2024. And they're thinking about some of the things that they can leverage And one of the conversations that I'm having with a lot of my stores is like, dude, there is a humongous opportunity right now with traditional mediums. I think that we have gone too digital. And it's not just me saying it. Look at the stuff, and I've said it before in previous episodes, but this is becoming a recurring theme. Look at platforms like Google, look at platforms like Microsoft Auto or Bing, however you want to look at that. where they first, it was VLAs and all listing ads. And let me show you a picture of the car. So you click it. During the pandemic, that was perfect because as long as you had the car, the demand was enough where people were going to click and they were going to end up on your website and all that was great. But now with performance max, why do you think that they went to performance max? Why do you think that now they're saying, Hey, give me all your content and let my platform distribute that content to put it in these places where it's going to perform the best. And it's not just about my car anymore. It's about the branding message. Why are they doing that? Because they know that that's the next thing that it just having your cars out there on all these different places where it's just a picture and the price isn't enough because when you do that, you reduce it to price only. That's it. You have a commodity. You're putting it in all these different places. So whoever has the cheapest price is going to win. But if you have a branding message that you can build a campaign around, you can tie your brand around that. Now you're selling the customer on why they should buy from you. Why? And that's a totally different message. And that's why these platforms, even though they're quote unquote digital, are going into that realm and they're dipping their toes on that. And they're trying to make that the next wave, if you will, of what we call digital marketing. So what are your thoughts on that concept? What do you think?

Tim Rowe: Well, I'm going to be an unpopular guest after the next 60 seconds because offline attention arbitrage is the business that Google, Amazon, and Meta are in. The difference is they sell it back to you with a pretty dashboard. They're taking advantage of the fear that small local advertisers, i.e. car dealers have about deploying capital offline because there's not as deterministic a feedback loop as spending money on ads on the internet, but it's exactly what they do. Google, Amazon, Meta, they're three of the top spenders on out of home and traditional media. Why? because they understand that they're converting offline attention into online attention. They're packaging it together with a dashboard that tells you how many people clicked on the ads, and they're giving you that peace of mind that your investment is generating some sort of return on ad spend that they're then using to go spend on more offline channels. So there you go. So there's the truth of it. And as we get into a changing market, right, where we've been coming out of a time of growth and profitability, this becomes a game of market share. This is a game of, you've got to keep the pieces that you've earned now over the last few years.

Herb Anderson: Let me interject there too, because this is a great, that's a great point. And dealerships, dealership decision-makers oftentimes don't even realize this. And let me, I'm going to break it down for you guys. So in a way that it's going to make a whole lot of sense. Let's say that you have a hundred dollars of marketing advertising budget. You know, for a fact, this is a fact. 10% of that money is going to go to bots. So $10 are going to bots. You're going to lose that money. If you take that same $100 and you put 10% into traditional, That's a better return on your investment. That is a better return on your investment because you know, that $10 is going to people to eyeballs. And then you take that $90. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. You take that $9 and now it's reduced. Your waste is reduced. So traditional has its place. You cannot forget about traditional.

Tim Rowe: It's underpriced. It's offline attention arbitrage. It's what you're being sold in all of your digital advertising. That's what you're buying. Yeah. What you're buying is converted offline attention. Okay. Just Google and meta and Amazon have really great data scientists and ad platform engineers who have figured out how to productize and sell it. Right. So as we get into this time of, of growth and profitability, you know, kind of moving to the back burner. Now we're talking more about market share. Market share is surely a representation of mind share. How much attention are you buying in the market? And it's really, really hard to build a brand, to build a top of funnel brand digitally. It's really, really hard. I can't think of a single Fortune 500 company built off of Facebook ads. I don't know it. If someone knows it, I'd love to find out who that is. They don't exist. And there's a reason for that because people believe things that are in the real world, whether it's a billboard, a wrapped truck. And when you start to look at some of these formats for what they are, there are huge pieces of physical real estate that you can own. I know that's something that every dealer can appreciate. Owning real estate You have an ownership opportunity in your local community targeted by zip code that is in front of the people who have the means to do business with you every single day. When you break it out on a cost per thousand standpoint, a wrap truck campaign, less than a dollar per thousand billboard campaigns, four to $5 per thousand, but you're spending $35 a thousand on CTV because it comes with an auto intender list. Like that's really hard for me to rationalize as someone who sold it. I sold the stuff and I sold a lot of it. And I just have a very hard time rationalizing that in a serious conversation going into 2024.

Herb Anderson: So I'm a digital guy, right? So there is a place, right? I think there's a place in your mix. But just like I explained right now, if you go 100% digital, you know 10% of your money's gone. Gone. Gone. It's a waste. Gone. Right? So you have to make room in your marketing budget to have a more comprehensive mix, marketing mix, if you will. The problem is, and if you don't believe me, run an ad, run a lead ad on Facebook and tell me how many of those customers actually pick up the phone or are the right numbers. It says you had, yeah, my cost per, it's a dollar for a lead. Great. Fantastic. How many of those people actually are real human beings? Right.

Tim Rowe: So it came into the showroom, gave you an opportunity to give them a demo, service their vehicle.

Herb Anderson: Yeah. A whole lot of them. And that goes, oh, well, I'm just going to switch it to AIA ads. Okay, fantastic. Why? Because the numbers, there's clicks. Okay, but you think that the bot traffic went away just because it's clicks now. You know what I mean? That's a mistake and a concern for me, even as a digital marketer, because we're going too digital. And to your point, there's no way to create a true branding message On on on auto trader what you got your car your price what else do you got your gonna put in the comments people don't read comments. Right you're gonna put it yeah you're selling price on an item so you know like we don't understand that the marketing is the how but the branding is the why. It's the why. So you have to be able to tell the customer the why, and you can't do that if you're 100% digital. It's very, very difficult, especially for those stores out there that are gross focused. Good luck, because now you have prices that are higher than the average, and you're putting your cars in a thousand different places, and people are just going to look at it and be like, oh, you're overpriced. No, thank you, because you don't have anything else. How else are you telling your story? How else are you telling the customer why they should buy from you? Why should they pay that extra 10% or 12%? You know what I'm saying?

Tim Rowe: Let me give you some scary statistics, and I'm with you. My pitch is extreme the other way because it is that overcorrection that I think ultimately lands you in the middle. It's a It's a harmonic balance between cheap top of funnel attention. How can you do the same thing that Google, Facebook, and Amazon are doing? How can you arbitrage the top of the funnel to fill that bottom of funnel that you've got humming. Let me give you a few stats here. One in 10, one in 10 people are using a VPN to mask their location. So there goes your location targeted marketing, right? 50% of the population, 50% of everyone in the US is using some sort of ad blocker. The cost to create the content that you're using for advertising, you're surely recognizing that's going up 20% to 40%. The cost to create content, Brandfolder reports that 68% of content created goes unused. So net that math out. Add effectiveness online down 30%. The cost to acquire a customer for a baseline of 10,000 companies on the internet is up 50%.

Herb Anderson: Wow.

Tim Rowe: And those numbers- It tells you it's not sustainable. It's not sustainable. You cannot continue. And dealers are feeling it. Surely it's showing up in the P&L. You know it, but you don't know how to identify it yet. And I think that this conversation is a really good starting point to take a look at it.

Herb Anderson: Yeah. Again, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is because I think that it's… I almost feel like we have to Wake up right we have to have a wake up moment that we can't just be it but we went. To digital and i've said i said it before i'm gonna say it again we're too far to the other end that's not it's not enough. It's not enough unless you're one hundred percent. you're just going to have the cheapest cars and you're going to have the most cars. If that's your strategy, then you can put your cars all over the place, you're going to win, right? Because you have the cheapest cars and you have the most of them. But for the majority of dealers, that's not the case. So, and we've gotten used to profitability, which is another thing. And we didn't just enjoy profits for two weeks, by the way, we enjoyed nice profits for three years. So we've gotten used to that, that nice PVR.

Tim Rowe: You know, and something that's interesting that I think, let's pull two concepts together here, that $100 ad budget that you played with before and go all the way back to the beginning of COVID. What did every dealer do in the uncertainty? went dark. Every dealer went dark. Because I don't know if I'm going to be able to sell cars up in the dealership. I don't know if I'm going to even be in business. Everyone went dark. And then to your point, hey, we were making hay, so we're just going to spend a lot of dough. We're not really going to manage the checkbook as tightly as maybe we should. But now let's think. I have some friends I talk to frequently that are still managing dealerships. And it's funny to hear the conversation about, we're a digital dealership. We're a digital dealership. Let me tell you how I would kick your ass if I knew you were a digital dealership. I'd say that you're spending $100 on digital. Cool. I'm going to do exactly what Herb said. I'm going to take $10 out of my hundred and spend it in some sort of offline media because that $10 is 100% more than what my competitors do.

Herb Anderson: Exactly.

Tim Rowe: It's that easy, right? I've de-risked my exposure to how much of my budget's going to bots, right? Because 10% of 90 is that $9 that we talked about. So instead of $10 and 10%, it's $9 and 9% of the overall budget. And then you're building that compound effect month over month over month. Having a couple billboards you got a mobile recall center got you doing mobile warranty work why not put a couple of rap box trucks on the road it looks like you've got cruise everywhere guess what guess what brand delivery trucks do they make deliveries all over town which guess what that means they send traffic like. I've never sat and stared at a Facebook ad for seven minutes. I don't know if you have, but I've sat in traffic behind a truck before. For sure.

Herb Anderson: Right? Yeah. And you guys talked about it in a recent episode of your show where they, and I can't remember if it was you or your guests, but they were talking about like, you can park that car at a Walmart. What are they going to say? They might call you and be like, Hey, I need you to move this car. But how many people are going to see that car parked there?

Herb Anderson: You know what I mean with all that foot traffic easy, right?

Tim Rowe: Like hey, it's the end of the year Let's do let's do an LED truck if you've never seen these things so like movie theaters on wheels, right? You've got two sides two sides of the truck that that they play full motion video. You've got the full back It plays sound outward So it's like an ice cream truck and you could be driving that thing around your town while everyone else is at out Shopping for a few G's on the weekend like okay, cool. Yeah, your balloons look great, but also I just got stuck in traffic behind a movie theater on wheels. Like I don't know, like the, those opportunities and to your point of like over-optimized to digital, I sold it. Like I've reformed, I've seen, and here it's not just me, Airbnb, Airbnb, the CFO from Airbnb talks about this all the time, that since they switched from performance marketing to more brand marketing, They've gotten back to growth. They're more profitable. They're a healthier company. Overall Adidas, same thing. So these are big mega global brands. And again, the ad platforms that you're buying attention from on the internet, they're all doing this anyway. They're just not telling you they're doing it. So I think that that's, that should be your permission slip to try something new and to, and to break out of that echo chamber, if you will.

Herb Anderson: Yeah. Two things I want to talk about. I want to talk about the digitization, because there is a digitization to traditional or out of home. And we're going to expand on that in a minute. But the other thing, too, is that it's a differentiator, man. To Tim's point earlier, your competitors stopped doing that a long time ago, just like you did. Just like you did. Yeah. Go back to it.

Tim Rowe: Just because your digital agency thinks it's a crazy idea. The reason they think it's crazy is because they don't understand it. And they don't benefit from it either. And they don't benefit from it either. But I actually think that that's the opportunity for digital agencies is like, here's what you… Let me clarify that because it's not like they benefit financially.

Herb Anderson: Of course, they have their agency fee, but they don't benefit on the metrics because they can't prove that it works. That's what I mean by that.

Tim Rowe: So here's, here's where I'm going to give permission slip to the agencies now to do more of this stuff. And you can email me if any of this is interesting, Tim at the OOH insider.com. I have four years of content on exactly this topic coming from a car guy perspective. What shows up in the analytics. Reduce cost per click. Your SEO performs better. Your SMS response rates go up. Your email open rates go up. Your direct mail performs better. It's the ultimate in grassroots credibility. It's a trust and authority builder that no Facebook ad could ever create. A billboard on the side of the road and then I get home and I see the CTV spot because it's zip code targeted or I'm doing some sort of exposed audience for targeting because I want to be extra efficient. And then a direct mail piece shows up in my mailbox. That's how you win in 2024, is you think more about efficiency. It's not about excluding or including only specific tactics. How can I be most efficient in my market, in the zip codes that matter most, with the vehicle lines that matter most, and specifically with parts and service? Because that's, I think, the biggest opportunity right now. is to do some of the things we've talked about and to lean into that parts and service messaging as the economy tightens. People aren't thinking about buying new things as much. They're thinking about maintaining what they've got. So how can you own that mind share and create additional market share for yourself as the place that people service their vehicles during challenging economic times? Because they're going to be car buyers when we get to the other side.

Herb Anderson: Later. Yeah, of course. No, I totally agree and so so so to to talk about the other point that I mentioned the digitization which you kind of referenced already is Dude, you can still like You could pull a list from your dms right? You can put a parameter, right? Geofence, you know, you can run this, you can run like, okay, let's say you run TV in a, in a billboard and radio. Can you not check your website visits when this, when this campaign is out there? When the, when what's the high traffic for the billboard? Well, it's from 7am to nine o'clock because that's when people go to work. Okay, great. Now check your website. from like 10 to 12 and see if after you put the billboard, you start to see a spike because I got to work. Oh yeah, let me go to the website because now I'm looking for a car. If you run a TV spot, when does it run? Okay, it's on prime time. Great. Now check that two, three hours after the fact and see if you see after you started that prime time spot, if you start to see that website traffic or that correlation of, oh, all of a sudden now I start to see a spike Um, for people going to my website, it's not a coincidence, right? You can set a benchmark of, Hey, this is prior to the ad. This is after the ad. And you could clearly see that there is a correlation on the, on in digital form of people going to your website, which is ultimately what you want. Like I'm a big fan of. Not a big fan, but all my strategies are based on driving people to your dealership. I don't care about having my cars on somebody else's website. I don't care. I know I have to be on there. That's only good for them. Right. I know I have to be on there. I will be on there with the minimal possible budget, and that's it. The majority of my advertising should be to drive people to my sandbox, where I control the experience. I control the narrative. It's only my inventory and not my competitors. And so there's a absolute, you know, like I was talking to dealership the other day and he said, dude, why don't we just do a billboard that has my website on it? And I was like, yes, let's do that. Black background. It's just www dot whatever, whatever auto.com. That's it. Yes, just do that. Yeah. And then let's see that and then see if you don't see a correlation of figure out what the high traffic areas are and then look at that for a couple of hours after those those times and tell me that you don't tell me that you don't see a spike.

Tim Rowe: search console, go right to Google Search Console, go right to Google Analytics, look at your Google My Business, look at phone calls, direction requests, look in Google Search Console for branded keyword traffic, look in your analytics for direct and organic traffic lift. That's where it's going to show up. That's exactly where it's going to show up. And I've seen it consistently over and over and over and over and over for The biggest sprint from the LA Clippers to Leafly to B2B SAS and FinTech companies, the way that they think about, and it's interesting coming from the world of auto where everything is so scrutinized and what did this tactic do for me this week? And did this car sell or not? It's not how these companies think. They look at the overall cost to acquire a customer relative to the lifetime value of that customer. They're not sitting there scrutinizing. They're looking for, hey, I changed this lever. I turned on out of home. I added television. I mixed in CTV. Did my overall cost to sell a car go up or down?

Herb Anderson: Right.

Tim Rowe: Up or down? Did I get more customers? Did I get more traffic? Very holistic, not through the lens of a microscope where I'm looking at every tactic specifically. Something that I think is interesting too, and I did this when I was running marketing for a dealer group. This is really before I got into out of home. We ran a blind credit campaign. We created a completely second brand that was just for special finance. We had a vanity telephone number that was 1-800-FRESHSTART. We did billboards. We did cinema advertising, 100% direct response. And that phone number led to an IVR that was then manned by a call center if they qualified through the soft credit check. another way to start testing other things. Maybe you have maxed out everything that your dealership can do in your footprint. Are there other ways that you can start monetizing other pieces of your business? So I think that just thinking differently than what you've been conditioned to as someone who's broken out of the matrix, it's pretty exciting. And I think that dealers are going to be more profitable as they start to think through some of these things and really make those hard decisions.

Herb Anderson: Yeah, I agree. And I think that the other thing too, that we, I think that these agencies did a bang up job of selling you on, oh, you don't need to be on traditional anymore. Right. Because you couldn't- I was him. Herb, I was him. Yeah, because you couldn't quantify, right? So I used to sell TV, right? And it was, it was a very, okay, we have an audience of X, but you know, what do you trust in Nielsen ratings? I mean, we know that how inaccurate those numbers really are. Sure. It's a diary market. So I mean, and I was selling in the Hispanic market, which, you know, like all the data shows that actually Hispanic audiences still to this day, actually do watch commercials and they do watch shows live. And the data supported the reason why they needed to invest, but still that, you know, like everybody was switching to digital and it was like, yeah, I mean, yes, there is, there are some advantages and yes, there's some, there is the, The data is not what I'm trying to get at, but the attribution that everybody always wanted to see with some of these traditional mediums like radio and TV, and so you could see it that way. But it's not, just because, to your point earlier, just because it's on a pretty dashboard and it says that you got this click for this price, doesn't necessarily mean that that was a valuable click.

Tim Rowe: And did it do anything to building long-term brand equity in your dealership, in your brand? And what I realized through this journey myself to learning and loving out of home is that for marketers that haven't tested offline before, or maybe used to do offline, but it's harder to rationalize because we don't have as clean a data set. I realized it's really about creating investment confidence. How do I confidently invest in the channel? And what's interesting about out of home, and we're seeing more use cases for it in radio and traditional linear TV, but there's a few different companies. One is Placer AI. And what they do is they actually are a commercial real estate and civic planning location intelligence company. And what's significant about data collected for that use case, for the offline purpose of commercial real estate, what roads should we detour onto when we're doing this big construction project, which neighborhoods have the highest crime rates relative to where we should build the next school. When the data is collected for that purpose, it's not subjected to the privacy laws that impact ads targeting on the internet. So why is that important? It means that the real world is more deterministically targeted than the internet. If you need to see, I can look at your dealership, your competitor's dealership. I can tell you which roads their customers take to get to and from the dealership. I can tell you where their customers go before and after. I can tell you how long the average customer waits there. Oh, hey, they have an average weight of 120 minutes. You have an average weight of 150 minutes. You have a three and a half star rating. They have a four star rating. I think we have a problem here." Or, I know which roads their customers are taking when they leave. You want to run a conquesting campaign? I know about a little billboard on the side street that 64% of their customers take when they're exiting the dealership that's 300 bucks a month.

Herb Anderson: Well you did a video, I saw that a while back where, I thought it was pretty awesome actually. You were like, now this is a perfect out of home campaign and you were driving and like it took me 40 minutes to get and every 15 minutes there was a billboard for that same business. You're like, you're gonna tell me that they didn't see that? Like come on.

Tim Rowe: And they're up right now. It's for an oil company. And it's funny, but we saw them this weekend on the way to church. My son said, we were like three towns away. Our church is about a half an hour away. We live in Hackettstown, and the company's name is Hackettstown Oil. We saw their billboards three towns away and my son confused, my son confused goes, we're still in Hackett's town? He associated the billboard with this company who he's seen a million times. That's the sort of ownership that a billboard creates. For a second, my son was confused where the heck we were. And that's such a cool opportunity. And even if it's not a traditional billboard campaign, I know that especially for the digital focus dealers, programmatic, digital out of home, you can dominate your local market. You can be in every doctor's office. You could be at every gas station pump. You could be in every C store. It doesn't necessarily have to be a big billboard on the side of the road or a wrap box truck or something big and expensive. You can get started.

Herb Anderson: But you don't see that anymore, Tim. You don't see it. I was thinking about that the other day. The only time I see a dealership billboard is those digital billboards where it lasts for five seconds and then the thing is gone.

Tim Rowe: Right. And they're doing it because it's like a promotion.

Herb Anderson: It's like a, or a bundle that's bundled with their agency and their agency can say like, Oh yeah, I got you on this billboard. It's just kind of like an afterthought sort of a deal. So there's, it's not really a campaign with a branding message that's targeted to tell the customer why they should buy from you instead of, Hey, I got the car and I got the cheapest price.

Tim Rowe: And it's a moving target, right? And it loses that factor of, this is my flag. I am claiming this territory as mine. When I put up a billboard, when I put a piece of static, large format, lots of square footage advertising into a market, I'm saying, I'm here, I'm serious, and I'm not leaving. And that's a powerful, powerful thing to be able to do.

Herb Anderson: Well, that's the other thing too, that we lost the connection. And I'm speaking 100% about the car business, so marketers outside of our industry that look at this, this isn't towards you, but we've lost our identity, our marketing identity, because every time we do a marketing campaign, it's always about this month, this deal, did I sell a car, and that's traditional. This is what I tell the dealers when they ask me for a full strategy. You're going to do this much percentage of your budget in traditional, you're going to do it forever, and we're never going to talk about results. We're never going to measure how the billboard, if anybody, you're not going to ask me about, we're just going to do it. We're going to do it forever. You're just going to prove the creative every month. And that's it. We're not going to talk about it anymore. Like it's just because we get lost in this thing that. Oh, I have to have the click or I have to know exactly what I got out of this. It's just not, those are things that think about it. Like when you're looking for a car, for instance, let's talk about dealerships. You're probably not going to see that message subconsciously. At a subconscious level, you're going to be aware of it. It's just like when you walk into a room. You're aware of everything that's in the room, but if somebody asks you, what color was that chair? You're probably not going to remember unless you sat on it. Or you wanted to sit down and somebody was sitting on it and you're like, man, I really want to sit down, but somebody's in there right now. You know what I mean? Then you will remember it because it's something that it became part of your of your memory. And that's exactly what these things do. It's there. It's in your subconscious going, going, going until you need it. And then boom. That's the, oh yeah, that's the website you go to, or that's the dealership that you stop by because you've been so ingrained in that message. And you know, well, it's not, they don't just have cars at a price, but this, these are the reasons they've told me multiple times. This is why I should choose them over the competition.

Tim Rowe: Right. What did we used to say when you let a customer out with a price that was so low and you were never going to take that deal? We're going to what? We're going to break their legs. We're going to take them out of the market. Right. Well, what if you could take a customer out of the market- Before. Because you own their mindshare. Right. Yeah. Right? Because they didn't even think about the other guy. They didn't even think about, or they shopped their website, but they saw your billboard four times in the last three weeks. And they're like, dang that, you know, I feel like it's a sign. There's actually a, I learned this from Andrew Huberman. If anyone's interested in the Andrew Huberman podcast, it's called the reticular activating system. and it's when we're paying attention for those little markers. And when we're super focused on our phones, it's very close to our line of sight, so we're focused in. Well, what is that? That's a very intense emotional state to be in. It's why we're fatigued at the end of the day. That's digital ad fatigue. Right. Because 2000 years ago, that meant you were hunting a saber tooth tiger, right? That's what that is designed for. While things that we observe on the horizon, we're in a more relaxed state. So to your point, exactly. It's a more subconscious. It's a more receptive for it. I'm in a more relaxed state. I'm actually more primed to receive your advertising than when it's two inches in front of my face. Exactly. What a crazy concept. Something else Google doesn't tell you.

Herb Anderson: Yeah. So I used to say this for SEM and SEL, and I'm starting to use that for traditional because I'm just trying to get this message across. So SEM is for now, right now. I'm looking for a car right now. I know the car that I want. I want the cheapest price. Boom. You're there. Okay. You can search. I'm there. You had your presence. So you're probably going to get the click. You're probably going to sell the car. But the traditional is the long-term strategy. It's the long-term success strategy because it should be about branding. You're not going to put one car in a billboard and say, this car is $20,000. You're not going to do that because that's not going to be effective. You got to sell the customer and the reason why they need to choose you over your competition. Same thing with the commercial. What, are you going to talk about all 300 cars you got on the lot? No, you can't do that. Or on a radio spot, So that's where there's that differentiation between the two strategies. It's a longer play, and that's why you have to do it forever, and that's why you never need to question it. You never need to sit down with your advertising agent. I mean, you can look at Nielsen reports, and you can look at that stuff, sure. But you shouldn't question, oh, should we continue to do this? Yes, you should continue to do it and you should do it forever. And you should have a branding message, not something that's tied to this month's sale, APR, and none of that BS.

Tim Rowe: None of it. None of it. It's an opportunity to be fun, to be cheeky, to make people laugh, to be a part of their day. Okay, you want to do a digital billboard campaign? Let's just do a joke of the day. Joke of the day brought to you by Tim's Toyota. Yeah. No special, no APR, nothing. Just make people laugh sitting in traffic. I, you won't be able to measure it. I promise you there's not going to be like a perfect attribution story for it, but guess what? You're going to have people who come in and be like, Hey, you know what? I saw your, I saw your billboard. That was fun. Right. Or, or post about it on social media and they're going to start to view you differently. And that's, that's mindshare. That's mindshare. Can I live rent free inside of your brain or do I have to pay $3 per click?

Herb Anderson: And for dealerships right now, folks, it's easy pickings because nobody's doing it.

Tim Rowe: Nobody's doing it. All of these media companies as well. Here's the additional incentive. If we haven't convinced you yet, I know dealers love this, when you can use cost as a lever, right? And cost is a lever to CAC, right? You need to be able to control the amount you're spending to acquire customers to do so efficiently. The incentive you have for doing this right now is that one, TV is obviously getting sold out due to an election cycle. So you're going to be priced out of television very, very quickly if you haven't been already. The out of home ad channels, the only traditional ad channel that continues to grow year over year, yet hasn't fully recovered from COVID, which means there are deals to be had. Your local billboard company has a huge incentive to win you as a client. Dealers are the largest local pool of ad dollars these billboard companies want to do business with you. They want your business, but they don't know how to talk to you because they don't know how to speak digital car dealer. So give them some grace. Give them an opportunity to win your business. Understand that you would be a great client for them and that they will deliver you tremendous value. Perhaps consider, like Herb has talked about, don't ask me questions. Yeah, that's got to sit on the part of the advertising statement that your GM, your digital marketing director, they don't ever get to touch. That's in the black box that no one can ever alter. But if you make that investment… Oh, and co-op.

Herb Anderson: Right. Oh, and co-op. Yes. I was just going to say that you can also co-op it.

Tim Rowe: Right. They're going to give you 50 cents on the dollar.

Herb Anderson: Why the hell aren't you doing it?

Herb Anderson: Anyway, dude, we're getting close to that time, man. I really, really appreciate this. This has been an awesome conversation. I can't believe 50 minutes already. I feel like we just started talking.

Tim Rowe: That is all killer no filler. If you didn't get something out of this, then I don't know.

Herb Anderson: I can't help you.

Herb Anderson: There is one question we ask everybody that comes on the show, but before that, I want to give you some time to tell us about you. How can we connect with you? Hey, this is from me to you, whoever's listening to this, you got to check out this podcast. Really, really insightful. Man, what was the name of the guest? I can't, I'm sorry I'm butchering it, but you guys were talking about your podcast and your strategy and you talked about Swell and Opus and all that stuff. I want to reference that particular podcast. I'm going to put it in the show notes. I'll link to that particular podcast and then I'll link to Tim's full podcast so you can go check it out. But that episode, Man, that episode was really, really cool. I enjoyed that a lot.

Tim Rowe: It was a really good episode. Yeah. And it was fun because I was actually a guest on his podcast. His name is Cody Schneider. Yes. He's an AI founder and a growth hacker marketer that I really put a lot of faith into, and he's helped me grow the podcast a ton. So that episode specifically is called in the pit. You can go to the OH insider.com and it'll be on the first page, but we'll make sure that it's linked in the show notes below as well. And, and I think that, I think that the value for dealers to take out of that, which is in this ties off, like comes full circle on what, where we started about starting podcasts. Why? you have an opportunity to develop your own personal thought leadership brand. And whatever happens in the car business, whether you do billboards or not, the value that you bring as an executive to the companies you work for more and more is going to be associated with your personal brand. That podcast specifically is about how to build a personal brand, at least the way that I've discovered how to do. It doesn't mean you need to be a full-blown podcaster, but I think it's something really important to think about and it's a great opportunity for people to get out to help grow others, but also to build a little bit of a moat around yourself as well. So that's a great episode. Thanks for bringing it up.

Herb Anderson: For sure. So go to the show notes, want to check that out. And then also go to the show notes to check out a link to Tim's entire podcast, his website, his whole deal, doing a lot of amazing things, man. It's really good to reconnect with you. Appreciate you taking the time to join me. And we do ask a question to everybody that's on the show. And that question is, where do you see the automotive industry headed in the next five years and why?

Tim Rowe: five years. All right. So I'm going to, I'm going to advance us to 2024 plus five. So 2029, I think that car dealerships are going to look more like delivery centers. Um, I think that the shopper experience is going to continue to morph and be more like a software customer experience where I've got someone who's dedicated to giving me demos. I've got product experts and I know some dealers are already doing this. I think that that That streamlined dealership process is going to be more at scale in five years. I think that there's going to be less of the hokey stuff, less of the 15 buttons on my website to try and get a lead. The dealers that figure out native communication people are people at the end of the day. Just figure out how to communicate with people and optimize for that. And then hopefully they're doing a lot of billboards too. So that's my five-year outlook.

Herb Anderson: Yeah. To your point, I think that it's going to be more voice chat GPT-esque where you're just going to tell the system like, Hey, I'm looking for a 2028 Ford F-150 with these accessories, this color and this price and the system is just going to go and find whoever has that car and be like, Hey, you got three of these options, choose it. So I think the whole, and if you want to submit a lead, it'll ask you like, Hey, do you want to give your personal information? Yeah. Yes. And my personal information, it'll be something totally, um, like that sounds awesome. So,

Tim Rowe: Right, automatically book the appointment, send me the text message, calendar reminder. It's going to be awesome.

Herb Anderson: No more, to your point, no more 50 widgets on the SRP. Now we put them on the SRP and the VDP because the SRP isn't enough or the VDP isn't enough, but you got to put them everywhere. Soon enough, there'll be CTAs on the homepage too, without you even having a car, they'll be asking you for the information. Like, dude, what the hell, man?

Herb Anderson: Oh, you're going the wrong way.

Tim Rowe: Hopefully we saved a few folks today. I think we saved a few.

Herb Anderson: Quick question. I've been wondering, and my producer has been wondering too, the Deadpool, what's the scoop?

Tim Rowe: Off to the other side there are all the other stuffed animals. It's my sons. And honestly, I just like the way it looks. He just adds a nice touch back there.

Herb Anderson: Right on. Okay, well there you have it, folks.

Herb Anderson: Tim, thanks again, man. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. And thank you for tuning in. That is all the time that we have today. And as usual, we'll talk later.