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Overcome the Risks of Digital Display

By Jim Irving
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Jumpstart Automotive Media's Jim Irving outlines a powerful tactic that should be at the forefront of every dealership's arsenal as it determines where to allocate marketing dollars.
Imagine 50 years ago telling local dealers that one day there would be a marketing tactic where they could target their message to car shoppers who are only in their market and know for a fact that these audiences saw their ad. They would have laughed you right off their dealer lot.
However, this capability has become a reality with digital display advertising, and this powerful tactic should be in the forefront of every dealership's arsenal as it determines where to allocate marketing dollars.
Display is in no way a new term to the world of advertising. However, it has taken on an entirely new meaning as a result of the internet revolution. For dealers who need an introduction to display as a digital tactic, let's start by addressing the two concerns that will arise most often:
People do not pay attention to digital display advertising.
There is risk associated with investing in digital display advertising .
Let's begin with the first issue: people don't pay attention to digital display advertising. If you took a survey of people asking them if they pay attention to advertising (regardless of media type), the responses would likely be dismal, leaving marketers to wonder why more than $200 billion are being spent globally every year. That is, until they see the post-summary results that would show that a high percentage of consumers do in fact react to ad messages despite how they would have responded in a survey. A simple example is the lift that retailers get in online and instore traffic on Monday when they push out a big sale announcement on Sunday.
But let's put that aside. What I want to focus on here is relevance. Regardless of the medium you use to deliver your message, the more relevant the message is to the audience, the more impact it will have. Think back to marketing fundamentals for a moment. Good marketing is really about putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. The better a marketer does this, the greater the return on the advertising investment.
I will add some color to the idea of relevance. Let's say a car shopper enters the market for a vehicle. As most do, "Car Shopper A" goes to an automotive research site as part of the process. In the beginning, Shopper A is likely to have only a general idea as to which vehicles will be included in the consideration set. Thus, if a marketer capitalizes on this assumption, it can take advantage of knowing the car shopper's current motivation and take the next step to craft a message that speaks to it. This precisely is relevance. In contrast, if Snickers ran advertising on an automotive research site, the impact is likely to be significantly less since Shopper A's current motivation for being online is to gather relevant automotive information to make the most informed purchasing decision possible.
The second concern for dealers is the perceived risk of investing in digital display advertising. The risk being that it is a less efficient place to advertise than traditional media, which largely stems from unfamiliarity with this tactic (remember, locally targeted digital display advertising has not been around that long).
For direct response-oriented tactics, such as lead generation or search engine marketing, ROI is easy to measure, and is imperative to success. Again, the real value associated with any display advertising is the exposure of the right message to the right person at the right time, and digital has a greater ability to do this than other media. When looked at appropriately, there really is no risk involved, as long as the messaging appears on sites that are clearly used by car shoppers as part of their research process.
So all this being said, dealers need to evaluate where the greatest impact of the next dollar spent can be achieved when evaluating digital display advertising vs. non-digital display advertising. A way to do this is test one variable at a time. For instance, reduce the investment in print for 3 months while increasing the investment in a digital strategy for the same period of time and then compare sales as well as overall quality of phone calls and self generated leads.
One of biggest mistakes that many dealers tend make is they determine how much of their internet budget to spend on digital display when the real question rather should be how much their overall marketing budget should be spent on it.
Digital display advertising truly enables dealers to stop guessing where the car shoppers are. This, along with crafting thoughtful messages that tap into car shoppers' current and immediate motivations, is highly impactful and carries little risk.
Jim Irving is VP of strategic media development at Jumpstart Automotive Media. Read full bio.