Dealer.com, a Cox Automotive brand, recently teamed up with Cartender, a provider of digital marketing technology, to announce a new opportunity for dealers to leverage video advertising to more effectively communicate and engage their car shoppers. With the growing shift away from television toward smartphones and tablets, Dealer.com and Cartender deliver high quality video advertisements to an engaged audience at scale for dealers across these digital platforms.

Video advertising is a consistently undervalued channel, especially given 20% of the population is no longer reachable through television as people continue to obtain information elsewhere and find other forms of entertainment¹. A major hurdle for dealerships is finding a scalable creative solution, to turn over new video assets every month. With this enhanced technology, Dealer.com seamlessly provides the details that dealerships want to highlight, such as their incentives, vehicle imagery and branding. Cartender will then take that information and transform it into compelling video templates.

“Dealer.com takes pride in finding undervalued modes of advertising channels for our dealers and removing barriers of entry to those channels,” said Mark Bernstein, associate vice president of advertising, Dealer.com. “We’re thrilled for this new venture, as video advertising gives dealers the ability to build brand and inventory awareness by connecting Facebook and YouTube audiences with their dealership in a dynamic and engaging format.” 

Dealer.com works with dealers to identify their specific goals, build creative, and automate monthly video updating to alleviate the time burden for dealers managing video assets.

“Video advertising is an effective way to communicate and engage with customers, but getting the content to market in a timely manner has been a major challenge until now,” said Collin Davis, CEO and co-founder of Cartender. “Working with Dealer.com is the perfect combination of video production expertise, technology solutions, and the most comprehensive vehicle dataset in the industry. Dealers can now target automotive shoppers with a video solution that saves them time and resources by getting their brand to market ahead of the competition.”

Nearly half of auto shoppers who used online video for research said that it helped them discover a vehicle they weren’t previously aware of or considering². However, many automotive dealers have been slow to invest in digital video. The typical dealership lacks digital video assets for content, or they have not previously invested in television or video advertising due to its high cost of entry.

Digital video should be considered an essential component for dealers’ digital advertising strategies because 97% of consumers either visit a dealership, search for inventory or conduct further vehicle research after watching in-market video content³.

Dealer.com continues to provide multiple creative solution options to help deliver the highest quality and scalable creative content to dealers. For dealership seeking custom video content, Dealer.com also offers an Advanced and Premium level video solution that combines store footage, branding, running vehicle footage and monthly offers allowing dealers to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Links:
Dealer.com
Cox Automotive