Episode 2 – Alex Gauthier, Director of Marketing at Heuberger Subaru

🎙️ Episode 2 – Alex Gauthier, Director of Marketing at Heuberger Subaru

Podcast: The 100 Marketers Project

Hosts: Andrew Street (DealerOMG), Matthew Davis (TradePending)

Guest: Alex Gauthier, Director of Marketing at Heuberger Subaru

In Episode 2 of The 100 Marketers Project, Andrew Street and Matthew Davis talk with Alex Gauthier, the Director of Marketing at Heuberger Subaru—one of the highest volume Subaru dealerships in the U.S. Alex shares what it’s like being one of the only marketers going through the NADA Academy, how he’s reigniting old-school channels like email and text with smart targeting and AI, and why owning first-party data is now mission-critical for dealers. From creative branding insights to the tools that actually make a difference, this is a must-listen for retail auto marketers who want to level up.

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro: Why we're interviewing 100 automotive marketers
 01:45 – Meet Alex: His role and why Heuberger Subaru stays independent
 04:10 – What it’s like being a marketer at NADA Academy
 07:30 – Data vs. intuition: Knowing when to trust your gut
 09:55 – Brand vs. demand: How Heuberger balances both
 14:20 – Subaru’s national branding and community expectations
 17:10 – The month-end chaos: How marketing handles pressure
 19:45 – Tools in the marketing tech stack
 21:30 – Connecting advertising to real sales with first-party data
 25:40 – Why targeting is the real key to great ads
 28:00 – How AI is saving Alex hours—and helping him rebuild a VW van
 35:20 – The power of AI in summarizing insights and scaling personalization
 39:10 – What’s working: SMS and email that beat salespeople's response rates
 44:00 – Lessons from high-performing email marketing
 47:15 – Knowing your customer isn’t you: Avoiding marketer bias
 50:10 – Owning vs. renting your data in automotive
 55:00 – The future: Activating small, high-intent audiences at scale
 58:00 – Closing thoughts: Be the dealer doing something different

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Transcript

We are on a mission to talk to the 100 leading marketing minds in the automotive space. I'm Andrew Street, owner of Dealer OMG. Matthew Davis here, chief marketing officer at Trade Pending. Why are we doing this? Well, we like automotive.

We like marketers, and we like retail automotive marketers. Our goal here is to give you the insights into what these leading marketers are thinking, planning, and doing. If you're interested in hearing a marketing director of a Subaru store who's about to get out of NADA Academy what the latest trends and the smart things that he's doing, including breathing some energy back into old traditional marketing channels, listen to this conversation that Matthew and I have with Alex Gouthier. Enjoy the show. Alex, who are you?

Where do you work? What falls under your umbrella? I am I feel like there's so many smart answers I could give right here, but I'll just play it straight for once. How's that? Sure.

Alex Gauthier. I'm the director of marketing at Huberger Subaru in Colorado Springs. We are I think, historically, we're the largest Subaru dealer by volume. Although we're an independent store, just one rooftop, always been right here in Colorado Springs, and no real aspirations of becoming a big, massive, fancy pants auto group. We we just like to be an independent store and do that.

That's what we do. So I take care of all of our marketing here. I take care of the full marketing stack. I've got just a small team, just a couple people that work with me, and, we kinda run the gamut of stuff. We run less traditional these days, but certainly traditional as well as lots of digital.

So that's that's what do you have anything out? I kinda wanna hear the smart answers if you have some smart answers. They there's this guy that I knew back in the army who introduced himself to everybody for the first time as the black blade of death. Okay. Superhero name.

I figure I'd start using that myself. And I would have sound Yeah. Yeah. It sounds mysterious, and it comes out of the gag order where we can't talk about the secrets that you're working with. But yet I won't respond now to any other name for the rest of this podcast.

Andrew, over to you. Yeah. Well, mister mister blade of death, I understand that you're going through NADA Academy right now. Yes, sir. That experience been like?

I'm really positive. It's as the marketing person going through NADA Academy, you're sort of a weird creature. I think, NADA itself, it is not quite sure to do with people like me just yet. There's more of us going through the program now, but it's kind of a weird situation because we sort of work at every department in the store. And, normally, you have somebody who has worked in sales or has worked in service or parts or whatever it is, and they're just going through to have the rest of the experience.

Or it's the, you know, progeny of the ownership or situation like that. So we have I think as marketers, we have a little bit of a unique perspective when we look in these departments, and we kind of we don't look at things through the same lens that a service manager would look at the sales department or vice versa. And NADA tends to they they assume I'm noticing that it's assumed I know, several things, which I most certainly do not know. So that's part of it, and it's a lot of coming up to speed trying to get that knowledge under my belt. And luckily, I have a great team at the store that are super supportive, so they're schooling me where I'm short.

But then I also bring a more analytical mindset to the other dealership operations, which I think NADA is trying to engender in everyone that's there, but it's kind of the default position for Us marketers already, at least most of us. So that's I would say that's the biggest thing I noticed. And then other than that, it's just, you know, what's your own where are your own personal strengths? Are you do you like numbers? Do you enjoy formulas and stuff like that?

If if so, an ADA has you covered. There's a lot there's a lot of those. Personally, I don't like doing the math myself. I prefer to use a spreadsheet or a dashboard to do math for me, but I'd say it's a very good exercise kinda doing it manually as well, and it's we certainly do a lot of that stuff. I like that coming from a marketer that you're not as into the numbers because it's easy for us in marketing to get sucked into the numbers, which is important, but it's all of a sudden you're just, like, metrics driven Sure.

Versus losing sight of outside the box creative ideas. Right. Well, intuition is very powerful. If you think something's broken for some reason, then you know to go look at the data to see if it's broken. And it's nice to have the data there to tell you if it is broken or if you just need to chill out.

Kind that's kinda how I think of it. You know? Let me segue into a question that's kinda related to that. Kind of. How do you there's the eternal marketing debate, like brand versus demand.

Alex, how do you think about balancing that budget of I need to spend some amount or do something to create brand awareness versus the spend on we just need leads coming through the door to get people to buy cars and schedule service appointments. How do you weigh those two? Well, it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg situation, isn't it? Because on because on one hand, if you think about what what truly is brand, it's certainly just not a logo. That's that's brand.

Brand is, I definitely strongly believe that your brand is who your customers tell you your brand is. You don't get to decide that. The only way you decide your own brand is by how you behave in front of your customers. So to have, you know, do I do I get my brand out there, or do I get my do I get the customers in the door? You kinda have to get the customers before you know who you are as a brand.

I think a lot of companies start off. This one certainly did. We just wanna we just wanna sell cars. Seems like a good business. So we started selling cars, and then over time, our brand is developed.

That said, for a Subaru dealer, brand becomes a little bit of a it it's an important important thing to think about because Subaru as a brand, Subaru of America as a brand, they're all about national parks and Make A Wish Foundation, and they really want car dealers to be more than just a car dealer, which we are. But what's so funny in our industry is that a lot of car dealers who are not Subaru dealers definitely believe that way. You can see that in the charities that we support in our communities. And although Subaru has co opted the community mindset, that's actually something that was our brand before Subaru started doing it, and I think a lot of car dealers could really say that. That said, as well, I mean, when I'm thinking about how do I when I'm advertising or choosing what messages to send to potential customers, it just kinda depends.

If it's high if it's a high funnel situation, we're definitely leading with brand, and we're hoping you know, they're they're probably gonna be looking at Subaru already, so they have some idea that, that dealer is gonna be interested in supporting the community. If they have never been in my town before and they just moved here, then I want them to see that we do embody those characteristics of the Subaru brand. We're a 100% in line with that. It's actually really important to us, not just for our business, but just for us personally as an independent store. I mean, we we do all of the stuff, but further than that, our ownership donates a lot of their own money and time to these same charities.

It's not just the business's money that's going into these things. So it really truly is who we are, but and you need people to know that, but at the end of the day, what they really care about once they figured out where they can buy Subaru, is is it a good deal? Are they gonna be treated well? So you can't you know, it's you're definitely doing both those things, but we we do think about that a lot, and it's important to us. It sounds like they give you autonomy to think outside of just month to month where right now is the July 31, by the way.

We're recording this, and there could be, like, a fire on your desk to sell seven new vehicles before close. Could be. Could be. Marketing sounds like we're able to yeah. Yeah.

I think it's more like 17. Like, okay. Keep going. Because marketing is really good at make getting leads, like, really fast. Yeah.

I can just That's what we specialize. Out of thin air. Yeah. I anticipated this situation months ago. So in the and then the NADA Academy, is it all marketers, or is it different?

Not at all. No. It's all the one we are you the one weirdo in there? I'm one of two weirdos. Okay.

One of the other weirdos is, she she's actually in the family of the store ownership. So her she's kind of is doing the marketing because they don't need her to do something else, and she happens to like it. But I've actually chosen this, existence, which you can make whatever value judgment you want to, I suppose. But I actually I actually have withdrawn to this from the beginning, and I think she she's really good at it, and, I think she enjoys it. I would encourage anybody to spend some time in the marketing chair at any store.

I think you you gain insights to other departments that you wouldn't otherwise have. But, no, I'm certainly, I'm certainly an oddball in that in that in that sense. Especially with a name like Blackblade of Death. But True. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's well, it seems like they've got, good focus on the growth of your career and your skill set. It sounds like the dealership's open to putting you into the program Mhmm. Time away from your desk.

Yep. I imagine that there's Yeah. Oh, yeah. Travel and all this stuff. That and that is not at all lost on me.

I I'm super flattered that they have the faith that I can even think about those other things other than just whether or not an ad is pretty or not. But, I mean, that's that's good. Makes me feel good. But, yeah, I would say, is it unusual? I don't I think it is a little bit unusual, for someone to send the marketing manager who's not related to their family or not somehow connected to store leadership in another way to the academy.

It certainly is a serious expense, not just the academy itself, but but the travel. So, yeah, it's extremely flattering. But even before this, they were I think part of their motivation is just making sure that we are kind of up to date on market trends and tactics and all, you know, all what what really matters, what the current state of the cutting edge of the tech stack looks like. These are all things we've always cared about. So I go to conferences, and I've spent I've spent time in 20 groups.

NADA has a digital marketing twenty group that you can join. So there are there are resources out there that they've plugged me into before the academy as well. That's great. They either view you as, like, very talented within the organization or everybody else just wasn't good enough, and so they had to send you. We gotta level somebody up here.

Yeah. Right. Ever or I drew the short straw. Yeah. There you go.

I have Nice. The same hand. Very tactical question for you. If you had to take a swing or a guess, how many tools do you think is in your marketing tech stack just to get stuff shipped out the door? They think about all the software tools you have to log in to.

I mean, the the personal stuff that I use on a daily basis just, I mean, there's just gonna be, like, your typical Google dashboards, that kind of thing. I use a lot of different tools just from to keep me organized and communicate with my team, like, just Monday dashboards and a lot of stuff like that. I use a couple of analytics reporting tools besides Google, and now I'm I'm pretty pretty heavily invested in monitoring, this this the sort of status of our first party data here at the store. That's increasingly a bigger and bigger focus for me. And, you know, and then and then in addition to that, I am looking at whatever metrics and KPIs our various ad partners are sending over and sitting in those meetings.

I mean, it's hard to put a number on it if I feel like it's I don't know. There's probably twenty, thirty different things Yeah. Easy. Looking at. Yeah.

Do you ever feel like you're getting closer and closer to connecting the dots between advertising and car sales? Well, I mean, with first party data, the the platform that I'm using now, I do feel like we're getting there. I feel like other industries have that particular thing figured out a little bit better than we do in automotive, and I think that's partially because the tech landscape is so fractured. There's so many different products out there. Some of it's super old school, and there's a lot of noise.

If you're if you're at a dealership and you haven't been exposed to as many things, I think it can be really difficult to figure out if you're being sold just the same thing with another logo on it or if there's actually something unique about a product or service you're looking at. I don't know that that's quite as quite as prevalent in, say, you know, the tech industry or pharmaceuticals or whatever other industry. Though they have I feel like they've got a little bit better access to those tools and data than we do, so it is a little easier to connect it. We're we're starting to get there, though. I'm starting to see more I can make more of those connections than I used to be able to say a year ago.

I think we got daint we got we got dangerously close to being able to really solve that riddle Yeah. A few years ago before the cookie deprecation and the lawsuits that flew around with, like, doing conversions API and offline event tracking and all these things to be able to see how many peep times people saw an ad, what the last time they saw an ad was, and then when they filled out the lead, then they turn into an up. And then by pulling out that data from your DMS, you can sort of paint a picture that could be an adversarial conversation with the dealer to be like, okay. 60 of the 85 sales saw these ads from here. Like, well, with then we would have sold, what, 15 cars?

No way. It's like Right. Well, they saw the ad. That doesn't mean they're gonna buy it. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Then they got That's where it's kind of on you to make sure your targeting is squared away. And that that's actually down to is the targeting is the part that's hard. Like, you can show everybody an ad.

That's that's easy. Like, you there's nine ways to send data to show every single person an ad. But, you know, you wanna show you wanna show they work best when you're hitting that person with an ad that actually makes sense to them and matters. Like, that's that's the kind of the holy grail. Actually, where that landscape is really tough is in connected TV right now.

I feel like that's the hard spot. Or even even Google search is tough too because they want they need the audience to be so big, but I actually don't want to show everybody on my who's been on my website an ad for a Crosstrek when only 27 hundreds of them were on a Crosstrek VDP. Right? Doesn't why should I show you a Crosstrek ad when you're looking at trucks or some, you know, some other thing? That's the blessing and the curse of segmentation.

Yep. Yeah. You can get super granular. Go ahead, Matthew. Yeah.

So give us a sense of how are how is AI playing a role today in anything that you do from your marketing position or with the rest of the team there? Yeah. Well, you know, full disclosure, none of us do our jobs anymore. We all just have some chat g p do chi do it for us. Right?

Is this even the real blade of death? Right. So I mean, I actually initially, I I mean, I have a sort sort of nuanced opinion of of this technology. We everyone's calling it AI. It's a little tough for me to call it AI because it doesn't really it's not the AI I dreamed of when I was reading sci fi novels as a kid.

Like, it's not self aware. It can't, it can't marry somebody or write a pop song that is written from the heart. Like, it's not it's not not true AI. So large language models, I would say, on one hand, they're definitely a force multiplier for me. There are certain things they I'm just able to do better, with the help of an AI.

And I'll use a non marketing example, just to give you an idea, although I apply this the same way in marketing. There is I'm restoring an old Volkswagen, Westfalia right now. It was my granddad's. So in chat g p t, I've created a project that I use for this. So there's all kinds of online resources out there that will give you information about restoring one of these things and all where you can get parts, how you fix certain things, what kind of issues you're likely to run into, like, whatever issue you're trying to figure out.

Somebody else has already solved it, and it's probably on a website somewhere. Now in the past, I would just search Google for that, and what I would get back would be pages and pages of information that I would not have a prayer in hell of getting through ever to actually get an answer. So then I would just go down the street a few days later and just ask a guy I know who knows more than I do. And then chance there, he might know that information, but to get to that answer could take me some time. ChatGPT is a game changer just for search alone.

Right? Because I can it'll search all those places, and it understands the context of what I'm asking more because of the rest of the conversations in the project that we've already had. So if I'm asking it about wheel sizes one day, and then a week later, I wanna talk about tire sizes, it already knows that I know that I need tires that fit the wheels we were discussing last week. Right? So it's got that.

But then on top of that, I have a spreadsheet of all of the modifications and improvements that I've already made to this van, and I've uploaded that into the project as well. So now it knows where I am along in the in my project for restoring this guy. Right? And then when I find a piece of information on that, oh, I'm gonna totally do this one day to my van, and I and that goes on a list of stuff. So it knows that that's in my plan.

So as it begins to recommend things to me, as I search I actually don't search Google anymore. I have a project that I search and do that I do research in just for this van, and it gives me information that is definitely based on the context of our existing conversation rather than just giving me everything on the Internet. And it even it even breaks it down into, you know, painstaking detail with nice formatting and little icons and stuff to make it pretty for me. And then if I tell it, hey. Just, like, just give it to me one sentence, it'll do that.

If I just want, like, short answer, it'll do that. Apply to marketing, that becomes really powerful. Or here's another example of going through my NADA certification. I have all of this information that I'm learning in class. So they they give you a workbook.

I put my workbook into the project, and then they and then I can anything that's in that workbook, I can now ask ChatGPT for that information rather than have to flip through a physical workbook. I can just very quickly get that answer right from the workbook. Plus, it knows it's an n a NADA source thing, so it's also gonna look at what is out there on the web that's from NADA. So I'm actually getting information that NADA has blessed as being correct information. But then in class, the teacher is giving me all kinds of stories from his personal experience, things that are not in the workbook, and then I have you know, you could go crazy.

You could put financial statement, spreadsheets, anything at all in there. It can analyze a financial statement, which I had I've spent the last year so far learning how to do. So pretty powerful. Right? And now when I come back to my store, I can say, hey.

Here's a problem I'm having in my service department. From my service class, I go in that project, say, hey. How do I fix, fixed absorption in this department? And then it was like, bang. Here's some things from your class, and I'll remember some of them others I won't.

Here's some additional things from the Internet that you might try. So it's really super powerful. It's not so much that it's doing the work. It's I think of it more the way I use it, it's more consolidating everything in one spot. Right?

It makes it really easy as a human being to digest information, get quickly to where you're trying to go. Like, just saves time. This is why I'm not saving money for my kids' college education right now. I'm not doing, like, the tax deferred account for her. It's like, if we can just she can be the master of this stuff and not need to go to college by being insanely resourceful and good at prompting and getting what I assume are right answers and build her own West Somalia.

There's a trap built into this too, though, that you have to keep in mind, which is the one thing I think that's saving us. And that's that AI AI has does have a tendency, I've noticed, to confirm your bias for you. Right? So if you ask the question, hey. What is the what is what are some good what is the best defense of locking down the lead gate on your digital retailing tool?

Then it's gonna give you all kinds of information. It's gonna confirm the bias built into that prompt. Right? But if you ask, what are the pros and cons of having to lock down lead gate in your digital retailing tool? Now it's gonna give you a much different answer.

So just because you can ask AI anything, there's a lot of magic in knowing what you should ask it. So you can't just it can't really just do your job for you because it it's gonna try to please you. It's like having a it's like being a king with a sycophant, like, advisor that only gives you good news and only tells you how beautiful and great you are. I need that in my life. Alright.

Well, that's that's you covered. Yeah. What for that daily affirmations. Yeah. What I'm saying is, like, kinda, like, tricky in the automotive space for vendors really pursuing AI outside of, like, the chatbot stuff, which is cool.

And that certainly has a purpose for people like me who can generate a ton of really cheap leads and have them find all the toads that'll turn into a prince and then just hand over princes to the dealer. Yeah. There's AI where you're making agents that are sifting data and things like that. And then all of a sudden Chad GPT comes up with this GPT agent. I guess that's what they're calling it, But it's cool.

Like, right now, while we're talking, it's, like, analyzing my two credit cards and all the points and how to best translate those to flights and what month to take these flights and get business class. You know? It's doing all this heavy lifting that I would usually try to pawn off on my wife, and then she'd turn around and give it back to me. Yeah. But now it's doing it for us.

But to, like, create this to analyze DMS data and say, okay, where are the diamonds in here of people who are off lease, recently or people who, you know, have purchased from us who aren't doing routine services to put them into these different categories and for trade ins. I think it's fascinating, and I think we might not need a bunch of third party tools that can do it if we can do it ourselves. Right. Well, the what I'm noticing is more and more of those third party tools are are leaning heavily on AI. I mean, even I just had a meeting right before this podcast about with a streaming TV provider who uses AI to determine targeting.

So that's that can be depend it can be that targeting can be really simple, or you can really get into it and make it complex. And AI can certainly help parse that for you. Right? And then I and, you know, with our with our again, going back to our first party data, like, our salespeople now have access to a tool where the it analyzes shopper behavior based on how what marketing they've interacted with, what their website behavior looks like. And then rather than them have to go through a lot like, amount of really useful data, which they are not gonna do because they frankly, they don't care enough.

Instead, they just read a paragraph. This customer is super engaged on, you know, Forrester VDPs. They interact with a bunch of marketing. They currently own this. And then that's all the salesperson needs to know, really.

Right? So AI summaries are, I think, another really powerful thing, but digging into business analytics, more like you're saying, Andrew, that is where I haven't seen a lot of really intelligent work done yet. That, to me, that feels like a little bit of a new kind of a new landscape. Yeah. It's amazing.

Like, now the conversations we have with prospects and with with dealers, like, Gemini summarizes these Google Meets, dumps it right into our HubSpot. So I'm not relying on people to take really good, you know, observations and notes. It's that we have a trailing conversation about what's important to that dealer now. Yep. You know?

Oh, yeah. Totally. I can access it. Everybody get you know, it's the world's becoming a better place is what I'm trying to get after. Well, that's the AI that's the AI I dream of, a better place, not the one where they take over humanity.

Right. Not the the matrix. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Alex, what's what's working well for here right now when you think about your marketing efforts? I am sort of in love with email again, to be honest. Having having the ability to I think a lot of people probably agree with that if depending if they're paying attention and they're taking ownership of their email program a little more. We have we run email two different ways.

One is an OEM provided partner. Doesn't work as well. It's kind of a set it and forget it type of deal. I don't have a lot of control over it. I don't have a lot of say over it.

Any changes to anything, of course, there's a fee to change that. And, ultimately, at the end of the day, I'm not their customer, Subaru is. Right. So that's not working well, which is surprising no one. But the audience activations I do through FullPath or, it's actually branded as curator through Reynolds and Reynolds.

That is kinda hitting it out of the park. I'm seeing higher engagement rates on text messages I send in my marketing than salespeople see when they're responding to customers. What's the difference? And not just, and not just, well, the difference is I think that, the messages well, here at AI comes again. The messages are generated by AI, and they tend to be they the the AI is choosing a message shopping behavior.

So it's gonna be more relevant, and it's gonna be and it's doing it at a scale that a human being can't do. Right? So I'm seeing, right now about 17% engagement rate on those text messages versus I don't even know what sales to that, but it's hard to get them people to respond to a text message from a person. And part of that is because, again, somebody else is controlling what the language is in the opt in text or the for the one that people are using. It's a 17% response rate to peep like, just kind of a cold out outreach to people who are already in your CRM.

And this is a marketing text. Yeah. So are you copying that with email? So email, I'm seeing around three to 5% on those, where where the open rate's much higher than that, but the actual click through rate is around three three to 5% depending on the audience. Some odds numbers guy.

Yeah. I do. I love I love hearing when people dig up, like, breathe life back into the corpse of what people think is a dead marketing medium. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, the e if you think about it, email email is great because it just I don't know.

I've I've read marketing emails that I get because I because I've opted in. There are companies that I'm engaged with. Right? I'm not I'm not I'm not allowing the email in my inbox for stuff that doesn't interest me. Right.

When it when it brings value to you. It's a great tip. Right. And I thought, you know, it's I think a big danger we've a big trap we can fall into as marketers is to make the mistake of thinking that other people shop and behave the way we behave and think. And I've I've been especially dangerous because as a marketer, you do not behave like your shoppers because you know all the tricks.

Right? I I do not watch a single second of television that is ad supported. Right? There's a reason why. Right?

So you could probably I'd probably figure that out. I don't wanna watch my own ads, and I certainly don't wanna watch yours, Matt. No no offense. Right. But the thing but the thing is is that's that's the that's the mistake we can make is I can say, okay.

I look at email, and I know that I'm engaged with my email when it's coming from companies who I wanna hear from. But the danger would be assuming that you guys are the same way. So that's where having that data to support what my intuition is telling me is really helpful. Right? So, Ryan, and that Go ahead.

It's it's kind of pulled it from, like, an era of knowing that your radio works and knowing your billboards are working, your TV. Because when, you know, mister dealer goes to the golf club, the golf course, like, his friends say, hey. I heard your radio ad. Right. That's true.

It's like the anecdotal affirmation, like, okay. Yeah. People are hearing it. Yeah. Working.

Right. Yeah. I mean, that's true, and that's it's funny. That's one of my if I'm critical of one ad medium or another, it's definitely gonna be radio or TV because at the end of the day, there's still even with all the fancy technology we have now, unless somebody actually clicks through on an ad, which they're not doing on their TV anyways, and if they are, they're certainly not staying on your website. Like, you would really still don't know if your ad is making a difference to that person.

Like, we all trust we have faith in it that it is working. Right? But we've kind of all agreed to pretend together that it's good. Yes. Well, the last thing you yeah.

The last thing you see is the sign spinner out front of the dealership. Right. He's like We've we've come full circle back to the brand versus demand debate here. Right? So Yeah.

For sure. So what's, what's next for you? For, as far as marketing or Yeah. Anything. Well, getting through NADA Academy, that's that's, that's the main thing.

I'm I'm already and as far as what's next, I'm kind of already there because the going through the academy is really contributing to my understanding of what matters to the other stakeholders in my store. So I'm able it's already enabling me to help them in ways that they were not able to articulate to me on their own, and but now I kind of have intrinsic understanding. So I'm trying to leverage that. And this year, I'm a lot of my focus this year is figuring out ways of connecting all this all these powerful and unique and very specific real time audiences to actual actual marketing activity. Right now, Mark, email and text is the main avenue that I can do that with.

I'm looking for ways to build to basically activate small audiences on on platforms that really do not allow it. So that's that's kind of the nut that I'm trying to crack. Like, Google doesn't want an audience of 400 people. Right? They want they wanna build an audience like those 400 people, and that's not what I want them to do.

Enable audience expansion to 4,000,000. Right. Yeah. It's like this morning, I was just talking with the dealer, and they're buying more dealerships, like, onesie twosies, sweeping them up. And it's, like, trying to figure out transferring admin and all this technical stuff.

Now they're gonna change the name of the dealership. But it's, like, step one, let's own the customer database. Let's own your customers. Let's keep our foothold on the market share that you guys currently have in every ad dollar. Let's just make sure we're owning our own customers.

Then we can look at conquesting and all the other ancillary stuff. But let's not lose a bit of transitioning. You bring up an interesting point there too because at the end of the day, there's really not that many dealers that actually do own that data. Like, yes, those are our customers. Yes.

We've been storing and gathering information about them for years and years. But at the end of the day, that data lives at Reynolds to Reynolds or whatever DMS provider you're using, and we have contracts with these people. And and, honestly, we don't really have control over it the way that, say, Walmart would or, you know, a big company like that. We're we're all even the big auto groups are not they're just not the same scale. So developing a huge database and then rolling that out across the dealer body where every store is a little different, like, that's a little bit of a tough nut for us to to crack.

And that is one thing that's on my mind is I don't actually own my data at the end of the day. Rentals could You go out of business licensing. Yeah. Right. You know?

And they can make decisions that affect me, and I can't stop them. But it sounds like you've got some big, things on the horizon. Like, you were looking at the the microscope of what's coming on in right now and and metrics. And then, like, with the telescope, it's like, what's down the road? What can we do to kinda, like, empower all of these audiences that you're able to generate with CDPs and with your own database?

Yeah. I mean And how can we be the dealer that's doing something unique? Thing is I mean, as far as if I could if I could generate a series of partners to help me in my business, it would be people that can reach small audiences on those platforms on, like, on on the web on websites, on, you know, in podcast, wherever you know, any place I can I can broadcast messages to just the audience that I actually care about, that's that's kind of the holy grail for me right now? I think you've got a bit of a monopoly. I didn't think that there was any Subaru dealers in Colorado, but I guess there's one.

And aren't people buying Subaru's in Colorado? Okay. Actually, yeah. 13% of Colorado Springs residents, anyhow. I'm surprised that that's awesome.

Yeah. Well, we built I mean, we're the only store in town. We've been here since 1978. And we actually just had our fiftieth anniversary with Subaru last week. So we're What?

Yeah. So we're, we built 13% here by ourselves. So we're kinda proud of that number. As you should be. Yeah.

I can't think of the name of the book, but there's a really good book about the launch of Subaru in The United States that's called something. It's a marketing book. Okay. It just talks about how nobody could say it, how they had, like, all these false starts, and now they're they they nailed it. Yeah.

Well, Alex excuse me. Blackblade, how can people follow you if they wanna connect with you? Probably the easiest way I mean, drop me an email. I don't know if you're sharing emails with us or not, but you can share mine if you want to or just hit me up on LinkedIn. Just look search for my name.

You'll find me. And check out his photography website also. It's fine. I've I don't really I'm not really running my photography business these days. So yeah.

Well, what I thought was cool. It's been mothballed. You can see some old work in my LinkedIn profile if you want. Yeah. I've got some photography from 02/1011.

Yeah. Okay. It's still sitting I'm still sitting on it. I pull a little bit from every once in a while and just that's what I Yeah. Just one path I could've gone down.

I know. I did go down that path, and then I decided I like being able to pay my electric bill. They are still paying. Is that Yeah. Right.

Yep. Well, Matthew, Alex, it's been a real pleasure talking with both of you guys. And, man, congrats on getting towards the finish line of NADA Academy and and continually growing, man. Yeah. I'm all super excited about this year.

It's looking great. Thank you, Alex. Hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you did, please subscribe to the show. It helps us get out to more people like you.

And if you know somebody or you're somebody that's a sharp marketer in automotive, please reach out to us. We'd love to feature you on the show. Reach out to Ashley at Dealer o m g dot com.