Jumpstart Automotive Group

Last week I sat with a group of leading digital automotive publishers at a marketing and product development summit in Key West, FL.  Bringing together the best and brightest minds from a variety of companies in a closed setting far from the daily barrage of emails, conference calls, financial reviews, and TPS report assembly allowed us to truly get our hands dirty with the unbelievable set of circumstances facing our industry.

Over the course of two days, we dove deeply into the problems faced by marketers as it relates to connecting their audience (currently at the lowest levels since the Truman administration) with the right message at the right time.  We tussled over lofty concepts of engagement.  We thrashed around controversial topics like privacy.  We argued about ad sizes, content adjacency, the role of advertorial, the delicate balance of getting the right user-generated content deployed, the surprising lack of advertising creativity for video, and why efficiency ad networks are the devil’s handmaiden.  In short, we covered a tremendous amount of ground, got solid commitments for joint product development initiatives, and developed some truly amazing ideas that will help our marketers win.  Time well spent.

Over the subsequent weekend, I and the other members of the Jumpstart team received countless emails, phone calls, IMs, and text messages from the attendees remarking about how this was such a great event — fantastic group, solid content, good ideas, and actionable tasks that we can use to measure ourselves the next time we get together.  After my narcissistic flush of pride of having presided over such an auspicious gathering bled away, I started thinking about the real reasons why this event turned out so well.  Certainly, the aforementioned accolades were part of it.  But the real key was that we had a group of individuals there that were on their own mission.  Each attendee was intent on solving broader sales, marketing, and product development problems.  Each participant was invested in this process before showing up, simply by making the space in their calendars necessary to travel to Key West during an otherwise busy and tumultuous time.  Put another way, the context of where we were doing it — remote destination with limited opportunity for outside distraction — fit perfectly with what we were doing — heads’ down work that required lots of participation, interaction and commitment.  This could never have been achieved on a conference call with the same participants given the same amount of time.  The distractions would have been too great.  The engagement would have been too low.

Over the course of my weekend musings, I thought about what we had done, who we had done it with, and where we had done it.  Then the obvious hit:  the reason for the event’s success had a lot in common with why the sites represented there are so successful at influencing their audiences when it comes to car purchases.  The “where” matters.  For those of us who think in terms of audience we sometimes lose the notion of context.  We have a tendency of believing that intent alone is as valuable as context + intent.

Thinking of just a few of last week’s attendees — JDPower.com, CarSoup.com, ConsumerGuide.com — allows us to quickly understand that the value of the customers within the context of their sites is significantly higher than those same consumers outside of their sites because the customers’ engagement with the content.  This is the place where we see huge gains for marketers attempting to influence purchase intent.

If you are Volkswagen and you are trying to get a fuel efficiency message socialized around TDI technology, your ability to do so is magnified exponentially when it appears in front of customers shopping the compact car or hybrid section of an in-market site.  Don’t believe me?  Think that you can use compact intenders assembled in non-endemic advertising to get your point across?  Check the intra-site cross-shopping data before and after your campaigns.  The same cannot be done, nor reasonably replicated in an environment that is attempting to target automotive intenders while they are looking at the box scores from last night’s games on ESPN.com.  Nor, in this instance, can we measure the impact on third-party lead generation, vehicle configuration, nor one of a dozen other significant markers that are captured while a marketer’s advertising occurs with an engaged audience in an appropriate in-market site.

But wait, you ask, doesn’t Jumpstart have a behavioral targeting product that collects audience behaviors so that marketers can reach an in-market audience outside of a contextual channel?  Yes, we do.  And we have found that this product works most effectively when run in conjunction with contextual advertising on in-market sites.  In effect, this allows us to extend the in-market site experience beyond the boundaries of its URL.

We need to re-shape our thinking to value this engagement as much as the audience that is assembled from it.  My guess is that BT messaging that carried forward a portion of the originating contextual site’s experience would allow us to be even more effective.  Kind of the same way that a whiff of salt air on a summer day can remind you of the beach in a much more compelling way than a billboard advertisement for Key West can on I-95 between DC and Baltimore.

For our part, we are thinking of only bundling our BT product with contextual advertising.  The difference in performance is startling, but shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Because the “where” does matter.