Jumpstart Automotive Group

I spent three days in Las Vegas at the J.D. Power Automotive Internet Roundtable event listening to marketers, publishers and vendors talk shop and pontificate on best practices and various points of “the funnel.”

Two things became clear for auto manufacturers after this event:

• There’s a lot of learning yet when it comes to integrating social media into their marketing plans
• They focus too heavily on digital metrics, and too little on audience, creative strategy and messaging

I’ll save the social media discussion for another day. The second point is the one that is weighing the industry down in a big way. And not even a week after the conference, Dynamic Logic released some information from a study that speaks specifically to this point. Their research found that creative quality is 50% to 75% responsible for campaign success or failure. The research suggested that the media side of the business spends “most time trying to optimize and measure campaigns, because the creative quality is outside of their control. If they got good ads to begin with, that would help,” said Ken Mallon, Dynamic Logic’s senior VP-custom solutions in Ad Age.

This all leads to the innate problem plaguing digital display advertising: a passion and affection for measurement, metrics and targeting, with messaging and creativity as an afterthought — essentially a complete 180 from traditional media’s creative-is-king approach.

The J.D. Power conference’s first panel discussion consisted of marketing representatives from three OEMs — Alex Hultgren from Ford, Kevin Mayer from Subaru, and John Lisko from Saatchi & Saatchi, Toyota’s agency. Not surprisingly, the primary theme of the discussion was the importance of metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) to their digital strategies. Surprising it was, however, for those of us in the audience, since the intro to each marketer’s presentation was a graphically aesthetic video collage of digital media ad creative and content with sight, sound and motion. In the end, the introductions each marketer led with and the actual discussion points that prevailed were at opposite ends of the spectrum.

So the simple question to ask is this: Are automotive marketers too focused on defining and standing by their digital metrics, and in the process neglecting the importance of reaching the right audience and delivering great creative communication to that audience?

Using the endemic automotive space as an example, clients spend an abundance of energy and resources measuring KPIs that only tell a fraction of the story from in-market media placements. Instead of concerning themselves with why they’re running the same static banner creative for an entire year (yes, this is happening right now!), OEMs and their agencies are more absorbed with pitting third-party content sites against each other to negotiate a lower rate backed by narrowly thought-out performance metrics.

My hope is that our advertisers can get beyond over-thinking measurement and nit-picking on every performance parameter and get smarter about creative messaging and standing out from the clutter. As an industry we get so caught up in the numbers, and the targeting and the optimization. We demand and expect so much out of media properties when it comes to those things. The creative, however, is rarely held to the same standard.

Show me dynamic messaging based on website content. Show me sequential messaging that tells a story. Show me creative that encourages brand and product engagement in the banner. Show me an emotional connection through video and rich media that can get a consumer excited about a brand. I know all of this is happening somewhere, but clearly not enough — these are things that need to become the standard, not the unique and different.

For all marketers, automotive or otherwise, de-emphasizing digital creative is a dangerous path to continue down. Let’s hunker down and focus on the conversation you’re having with consumers, instead of client and agency over-conversing about the number of brochure requests that have been tallied.