That car dealership in your neighborhood? It’s probably got a branding problem. Most local car dealerships do.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, and the worn stereotype of unscrupulous car salesmen certainly doesn’t help. Neither does the fact that consumers typically shop based on manufacturer rather than a dealership’s location.
Historically, car dealerships would try to overcome these challenges with linear TV ads. But now that so much viewership has moved to streaming platforms, linear isn’t packing the same kind of punch.
A startup that launched last year called Dealer Stream aims to help dealerships manage and execute their CTV marketing strategies.
On Thursday, Dealer Stream announced a partnership with CTV verification platform Blockboard to help dealerships target their streaming ad buys more precisely and also ensure their ads are fraud-free.
“If we’re going to recommend that dealerships allocate more of their ad dollars to this type of strategy,” Dealer Stream CEO Owen Moon told AdExchanger, “we’ve got to make sure that we’re reaching real humans.”
Finding the consumers
Compared to other industries, automotive is “just a little behind” when it comes to digital marketing, Moon said.
Most dealerships focus their digital strategy on three core channels: search engine optimization, paid search and social media, all of which allow for specific audience targeting at relatively cheap costs.
Lately, the industry has also leaned toward a system known as “inventory syndication,” where brick-and-mortar dealers list individual vehicles on different online marketplaces, such as Carvana or Autotrader.
Essentially, it’s the car equivalent of putting your product up for sale on Amazon. Consumers are technically buying from you, but they’re not coming directly to you to make that purchase.
Increasingly, consumers start their shopping journey on the internet and only go to a dealership in person when it becomes absolutely necessary, like to sign paperwork and drive their purchase off the lot.
“They just don’t necessarily think of car buying as a great experience,” Moon said.
The best way to change that mindset, he said, is for dealerships to better integrate themselves into their communities.
But there are only so many little league teams to sponsor, which is where ZIP code-targeted CTV ads come in.
Verifying consumers
The process of programmatic CTV buying isn’t all that different than the process of buying ads through other digital channels that local dealerships are already familiar with.
But the potential for fraud, and the fact that CTV is less performance-based and harder to measure than display, gives some dealerships pause. “They don’t want to buy against low-quality traffic,” said Moon.
To alleviate these concerns, Dealer Stream began working with Blockboard in Q4 to verify publisher inventory and audiences.
Blockboard uses “smart contracts,” which are blockchain-based lines of computer code, to verify the authenticity of ad requests. The code in these contracts is matched against the identity of a target audience using IP addresses, ZIP codes and other data sources and against the identity of the publisher itself.
The practical upshot of these efforts is that, if a suspicious or low-quality bid request comes through, it’s significantly less likely to receive an impression – and if it does slip through the pre-bid phase, it’ll get caught during post-bid verification, and Blockboard can immediately redirect the ad dollars elsewhere.
Engaging consumers
So far, Dealer Stream’s partnership with Blockboard has driven positive results.
Engagement metrics – specifically, the rate at which consumers visited dealership websites or physical locations – have increased by as much as 30% since the two companies began working together, according to Moon.
Dealership clients also report seeing their own ads in the wild, which has long been a challenge for CTV buyers compared to the certainty and reach of linear ad spots.
One such example is Feldman Automotive Group, a Detroit-based dealership portfolio with 20 locations in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio (including several that are co-owned, oddly enough, by actor Mark Wahlberg.)
Feldman CMO Al Gillespie told AdExchanger that, in previous partnerships with CTV companies, it was hard to tell if his ads were having an impact. “Everybody can show you amazing numbers, but I never saw a spot,” he said.
With Dealer Stream, however, Gillespie almost immediately started to get positive feedback from friends, family, customers and neighbors who came across his ads while watching Peacock or Paramount+.
That visibility has led to increased web traffic for Feldman and, as a nice bonus for Gillespie, a little more hometown recognition.
But, more importantly, said Moon, “it gives us much more validity that we’re actually doing what we say we’re doing.”
