Six Other Ways Auto Marketers are Taking it to the Internet
September 04, 2008

By Dale Buss

Automakers are moving forcefully into the online-marketing arena using a number of innovations in which their industry, arguably, has become the leader.

In Wednesday's part two of this three-part series on Internet marketing, Edmunds.com's AutoObserver featured six ways that automakers are succeeding online. Here are the remaining six:

Forging Partnerships

Automakers have stopped competing with third-party sites for traffic and now are cooperating with them in major ways.

Recognizing that most consumers start their online research at sites such as Edmunds, Kelly Blue Book and Autobytel, for example, General Motors performed an about-face and began working heavily with Edmunds.com. GM began making sure that the Santa Monica, Calif.-based portal had accurate and complete information about all of its products, that Edmunds.com reviewers had broad access to GM vehicles and that all of its products are correctly categorized on the site.

"We just made it easy for consumers to get complete information about GM cars and trucks from a source they value and trust," said Mark LaNeve, GM's North America vice president of sales. As a result, GM has cut in half the previous gap between its online market share and its overall market share and increased consideration among internet consumers by 50 percent.

Pontiac is using partnerships to stay on the cutting edge of GM's Internet-marketing forays. For example, it recently launched a new "owner-resource" section on Yahoo, which allows Pontiac owners to register and track service on their vehicle, receive monthly reports on how their car is operating via OnStar's remote-diagnostics system, and find the cheapest gasoline prices near their home.

As the audiences for traditional media brands increasingly prefer "experiencing" those brands online, more opportunities also arise for partnerships between them and OEMs.

For example, as part of its Olympics-related advertising, Chevrolet hatched a new partnership with Conde Nast that mainly has been expressed via the web sites of the giant consumer-magazine publisher, featuring celebrities such as the pop singers Fergie and Natasha Beddingfield.

Another partnership, with the "gentlemen's" site Maxim.com, has taken Pontiac into its first online foray into the customization market. The two brands have built a microsite around the Pontiac Vibe featuring Kat von D, a Los Angeles-based tattoo artist to the stars - and herself a member of the Maxim Hot 100 list. Kat Von D customized a 2009 vibe with tattoo decals, and enthusiasts can go to the site and "interact with the product and Kat von D," said Julie Mynster, Pontiac's digital-marketing manager.

"It has shown the strength of the digital environment and how we can integrate our products right into sites where consumers are," Mynster said. So far, she said, "all the metrics on this are up year-over-year compared with the promotion we did with Maxim last year" that was tied to the movie Transformers.

Getting Social

Over the last couple of years, no other portion of the internet has exploded as social media have, and lately automakers have been making extraordinary efforts to get onboard.

"It's unbelievable the amount of scale that Facebook has achieved in just the last several months, and the time that people spend there," said Mike Devereux, executive director of digital marketing for GM. So GM is getting particularly aggressive about exploiting the trend. The launch for its Chevrolet Traverse crossover later this year, for example, will feature a much larger presence in social media than the comparable Malibu launch did a year ago, he said.

BMW has been showing up on Facebook with all sorts of interesting initiatives for the 1 Series. It sponsored a feature, for example, called Graffiti, where Facebook denizens could virtually "paint" a 1 Series. "Very quickly, more than 6,000 people did this," said Patrick McKenna, BMW's North American manager of marketing communications, "and some people spent as much as six hours." BMW also allowed visitors to "send" a 1 Series on a "road trip" to friends and track the mileage it "traveled" - perhaps even around the world in sort of an exercise in six degrees of separation.

"We've been trying to do things where we're really engaging on these sites," explained McKenna, "not just advertising."

Such efforts also are including narrower social media than monsters such as Facebook and MySpace. For example, in April, Chevrolet cooperated with the AutismSpeaks.com site to support Autism Awareness Month, donating to the sponsoring organization every time a consumer took a virtual test drive of a Malibu.

People took nearly 55,000 test drives, and Chevrolet donated about $1 million. "This works out to about $1.80 for every virtual three-minute test drive," LaNeve said. "Is this as good as a real test drive? No - but [real ones] cost $150 to $400 a throw, so it's a great alternative."

Firming Up the "Electronic Handshake"

Automakers have been devoting lots of resources to their attempts to streamline the finalization of vehicle sales online. Whoever can figure it out early on will have a great marketing tool as well as sales platform.

But the requirement that dealers must actually consummate the sale is a huge complicating factor, because many U.S. auto dealers are far from Internet-savvy. And even linking with dealers who are web-progressive can be difficult.

So lately, Chrysler has been promising to announce huge advances that will put it at the industry forefront in managing "electronic handshakes," after working with a dealer advisory group on this issue since late last year. And Saturn has been in the vanguard of overcoming this obstacle for GM, with a pilot program in a handful of dealerships that is intended to allow integrated online execution of just about every aspect of a vehicle purchase that can be legally and physically accomplished outside a dealership. This includes checking dealer inventories, applying for credit and scheduling test-drives.

Among the challenges that the test has raised, Devereux said, are "make-versus-buy decisions" about how to put together the optimum electronic handshake: Does GM try to assemble a proprietary system end-to-end, or does it allow dealers to select third-party suppliers of certain services and then just figure out how to incorporate them?

"One thing is for sure is that this absolutely has to happen," Devereux said. "It takes way too long to buy a car and go through a lot of the menial stuff that isn't related to falling in love with the car."

Experimenting with Message

The Internet allows OEMs to inexpensively test and tweak various marketing messages compared with the cost of doing so through traditional media. At a time of lightning-fast changes in the U.S. auto market, this capability becomes increasingly important.

In the wake of the dramatic second-quarter shift toward fuel-efficient vehicles, automakers were in a quandary about how - and how much - to promote their gas-sipping advantages. Chrysler, for example, promoted its Let's Refuel America gas-price guarantee heavily online when it introduced the program in May, and traffic at its sites increased by 13 percent.

"We were able to use the metrics from our web site as an indication of whether the campaign was effective based on the objectives of the campaign," said Chuck Sullivan, Chrysler's director of interactive marketing. And while Let's Refuel America did little to spark actual sales of Chrysler vehicles, he explained, "the key objectives of this campaign were to generate interest and dealership traffic, and it was effective at both of those."

Before BMW launched a new TV commercial in June that touted its eight models that get more than 28mpg, it experimented in online advertising with that theme as well as an alternate message that emphasized one of the most compelling differentiators of its vehicles: "no-cost" maintenance.

"The beauty of online is that we could put both messages there and see what resonated," McKenna said. Early on, the fuel-economy message "had more traction," one finding that resulted in the quick release of the TV ad about mileage.

Growing a Niche

For some aspects of selling automobiles, the internet not only is the ideal marketing medium - it is the only feasible one. More automakers are figuring that out and exploiting the possibilities.

Mercedes-Benz, for example, has been focusing corporately on its Certified Pre-Owned (CPO) vehicles as a "key area of opportunity," given greater stresses on new-car luxury sales as the U.S. economy struggles. "And we recognized that the online channel is really the premier place for us to do it," said Eric Jillard, manager of digital marketing for Mercedes-Benz USA,  because consumers in the used-car mode "are looking for specific inventory units instead of general vehicle attributes."

So Mercedes-Benz has been working with third-party sites to help match its CPO vehicles to promising targets. For example, on Edmunds.com, when visitors are shopping for an entry-level luxury or a near-luxury model, Mercedes-Benz is paying for placement of its own CPO vehicles in the search ads. "We're getting very high click-throughs on specific matchings within Edmunds, so we really are getting people to consider [CPOs] this way," Jillard said.

Going Viral

Automakers are showing that they can play in the murky arena of viral internet marketing as well as other brand marketers do.

Few attempts at exploiting the internet's propensity for spreading buzz have been more daring, for example, than BMW's recent production of a half-hour "mockumentary" called Rampenfest, about a small Bavarian town's attempt to catapult a BMW car from Germany to the United States by means of a giant ramp. BMW kept silent about its role in the campaign, McKenna said, to stoke controversy about whether the whole thing was real or not.

Mazda is approaching viral marketing in a different way. It is focusing on taking photos and making videos about its products and then using the internet to distribute them as widely as possible, through social media such as MySpace and third-party automotive sites.

"We want people to be able to [digitally] grab a video from our site and put it wherever they want," said Rudy Privitelli, Mazda's U.S. group manager of relationship marketing. "We're glad to have them do it because that means more eyeballs on this stuff. Essentially, we want our content to be viral."

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