Automotive Advertising: The Good News is it Could Be Worse

There's a great article in today's New York Times

It's one of the few articles I've seen discussing the advertising slowdown from the local/dealer perspective instead of from the manufacturer point of view:

Ads from automakers — running nationally and locally — fell 19 percent in the first quarter of 2009, compared with a year earlier, according to research firm TNS Media Intelligence.

Ads from dealer associations fell 62 percent, while ads from the individual local dealers declined almost 40 percent.

Local traditional media — television, radio and newspapers — are more reliant on automotive advertising than any other medium. In 2008, TV stations got 23 percent of their total advertising from auto, followed by local newspapers at 17 percent and radio stations at 14 percent, according to a Sanford C. Bernstein & Company report released this month.

Terry Lancaster is the co-founder and a managing partner of instant-events.com: Automotive Advertising which provides car dealers with Radio, TV and Print Advertising plus pre-packaged sales events with no long-term contracts and no media or sales commissions.

Killer Sales Events

This month's Dealer Marketing Magazine has an interesting article on automotive sales events featuring an interview with internationally renowned marketing expert.... ME:

DEALER MARKETING MAGAZINE: How to Have Killer Sales Events

Terry Lancaster is the co-founder and a managing partner of instant-events.com: Automotive Advertising which provides car dealers with Radio, TV and Print Advertising plus pre-packaged sales events with no long-term contracts and no media or sales commissions.

Franchised Inventory Liquidation Ads

Terry Lancaster is the co-founder and a managing partner of instant-events.com: Automotive Advertising which provides car dealers with Radio, TV and Print Advertising plus pre-packaged sales events with no long-term contracts and no media or sales commissions.

If It Doesn't Look Like There's a Big Sale Going On.... There's NOT

Terry Lancaster is the co-founder of instant-events.com: Automotive Advertising which provides car dealers with Radio, TV and Print Advertising plus pre-packaged sales events with no long-term contracts and no media or sales commissions.

The 1% Rule of Automotive Advertising

There’s an old saying in the advertising business: “Half the money you spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is figuring out which half.”

That’s depressing enough, but the truth is that on any given weekend less than 1% of the people in your city are in the market for a new or used car. That means 99% of the population has almost no interest in listening to your radio spot or watching your latest TV ad. 99% of the population will never notice your print ad because they have no reason to go looking through all the car ads in the classified section.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the 1% who are in the market will pay close attention to everything you say, will actually seek out your ads with their checkbooks in hand trying to figure out exactly how much car they can afford.

These are the people you should target with your advertising.

Advertising to build a brand name and advertising to create immediate retail sales are vastly different undertakings. For instance, some marketing people will tell you that you shouldn’t have a big sale going all the time. “Look at Wal-Mart,” they say. “They’re the number one retailer in the world because of every day low prices. They’re not having some big sale every time you turn around” Well that’s true. EVERY DAY low prices works for Wal-Mart because people buy what Wal-Mart sells EVERY DAY. Their customers don’t have time to look around and research the best deal every time they buy a new tube of toothpaste or pack of underwear. And they’re probably not going to get excited and drive to the store because they think they can save $5 on a pair of jeans.

But people, at best, buy a new car every two or three years. The one person out of a hundred who is seriously looking to buy a car right now, doesn’t want LOW prices EVERY day, he or she wants the BEST price, TODAY! And they will get excited if they think you can cut their monthly payment by a hundred bucks.

That’s why sales events are so powerful for marketing car dealerships. Aggressively advertising a weekend sales event is all about attracting RIGHT NOW buyers.

If your target market is basically everybody, you can afford to do nice, polite image advertising with kids and puppy dogs. If you’re only advertising to 1% of the population, you’ve got to grab their attention and give them credible reasons to shop your store TODAY before they shop somewhere else.

If 99% of your friends and coworkers complain that your advertising is loud, obnoxious and over the top ...WHO CARES? What’s important is that the ad is exciting enough, dramatic enough and aggressive enough to get the attention of that one person out of a hundred who needs to see it and motivate them to take action RIGHT NOW.

###


Terry Lancaster is the co-founder of instant-events.com which produces quick and easy, hassle-free automotive sales events plus attention-grabbing, market-dominating, traffic-generating print, radio and TV advertising with no long term contracts, no commitments and no agency commission.

Contact Info:

1-800-352-3305
lancaster@instantevents.com