The process of buying and selling cars is changing dramatically with digital media. This new approach to marketing brings with it both massive potential to improve media efficiency but also the need to properly leverage data. “Digital is now your single biggest channel. Embrace it,” commented Christian Richter, the head of Google’s automotive global account team for the EMEA region, speaking at the Automotive Megatrends Europe 2014 conference in Brussels. Richter works with European-based car manufacturers’ sales & marketing teams to build digital solutions to help them achieve better media efficiency.
Pivotal period
Richter sees 2013/2014 as a pivotal period for the automotive industry. Today there are about 7.2 billion people in the world and 2.8 billion of them are online. By 2020, he expects to see the world population at about 8 billion, with 8 billion online. Not only are buyers spending more time online, but they are going online increasingly with a mobile device. The key for car companies is to match advertising spend with where their customers spend most of their time. “This is the single biggest challenge you have in this space,” he observed. “Google search queries on mobile devises are now surpassing Google searches that are coming from the desktop. So now, this little screen in your hands is becoming the most important screen… All of this is now reaching the critical tipping point. We see this as a big, big change happening now.”
What consumers want
Richter highlighted several key characteristics of consumers today. “They consume media in a completely different way. So let me tell you what actually your new customers will love. First of all, they love control.” He points to an example of the ‘House of Cards’ television series on Netflix, which met with great success. “Why was it so super successful? Usually, a new television series comes out with one episode a week. But here they released the whole season at once. And if you want it and if you subscribe to Netflix, you can lock yourself in a room with a pizza and watch it all in full. And people love this because they want to control how they consume stuff”.
Choice and immediacy are also key. “They love to have the choice at their hands so they love to individualise products. If they want something, they don’t want to wait,” he said. “They want everything now. And the last thing is that people love to create stuff. They are not just consuming content, they also want to create content, play it back, play with it and become creators themselves.”
Effective targeting
Richter has warned that the classic media approaches is reaching is limitations and the use of widespread television and print adverts represent an inefficient use of funds. Since more and more consumers are online, OEMs need to ensure they have a solid online presence and that they establish this in the most efficient way. Richter threw out two key figures: 1% and 90%.
“1% of people are in the market for a car at a given time. More than 90% of them search online,” he said. “If only 1% are in the market, why show television advertising spots to everybody? There is so much waste in the system.” He also notes that in the car buying phase, consumers today want a greater amount of detail and information than they may have sought in the past. “For the confirmation phase of the car buying journey, people want to go deep. You can’t fit this information into a one-size fits all approach.”
At 10pm, the guy managing the digital campaign is in the office, while the guys managing traditional media are in the bar
This is where digital media comes in. “You can target users in the market and deliver iconic experiences of your car/brand online. Consumers are leaning forward on their screens and asking things. You can give them an answer. You can tell great stories to fuel car buyers’ passion,” he said.
One big benefit of digital media is being able to present the right content to the right audience at just the right time. “Start with the moments that really matter for your customers,” he recommended. Richter offers some insight through the example of wedding planning, noting that most people get married in May/June. “January is the month that has the most searches for wedding hairstyles. This because men usually propose over New Year. The first thing a woman does is think, ‘How will I look on my wedding day?’. Same for wedding dresses.”
Richter believes digital media offers OEMs a means of more effective targeting. “Come up with a really cool way to respond to this, come up with the right trends/responses with this, the high seasons. If you are looking into data, and understand what customers want, you can bring them the products that really need in the moments that matter to them,” he said. “Go for the data, get the right insights.”
Hard work
The opportunities that can come from digital media come at a price. Richter cautions: “TV is easy, but digital is fairly complex. At 10pm, the guy managing the digital campaign is in the office, while the guys managing traditional media are in the bar. But it pays off on the impact. You have a top line impact lever. You capture all demand either by driving traffic to your national sites or you do it via dealer sites, directly drive traffic to dealers and they convert.”
Overall, Richter urged OEMs to embrace the move to digital and to mobile technology for their media strategies. “Mobile is the new digital,” he concluded. “Be aware that your consumers have full control. You can own the moments that matter to them and have the right response to them. Know what these moments are and embrace data to gain insights. Digital is hard work, harder than advertising used to be, but it pays off.”
Megan Lampinen
