I don't know why people hate them. I mean, listen, everyone knows everything about us anyways. At this point, give me the target and add, save me some time. Yeah, I think that's how most good zoopers feel. Google is changing the way it tracks you online and digital advertising is being disrupted. But the big question, what does this mean for the future of car dealerships? Today, I'm speaking with Ron Andrews, VP of business development at Cars Commerce, a technology company empowering automotive that simplifies everything about buying and selling cars. We discuss his $1 billion dealership marketing playbook, unlocking the secrets of a car shopper's mind, the end of targeted ads, and much more. Don't forget to click subscribe so you never miss an episode.
What's up, everyone? This is Car Dealer Ship Guy. You're listening to the Car Dealer Ship Guy podcast, which is my effort to give you access to the most transparent insights into the car market. But before we dive into the show, this episode is brought to you by CDK Global. CDK Global has been empowering nearly 15,000 dealers with the tools and technology they need to build deeper relationships with customers. Their team is keenly aware of the state of dealership technology. And while many vendors promise seamless experiences between your CRM, DMS, digital retail, and fixed ops, most of these bolt-on solutions tend to break workflows and cause more harm than good. That is why CDK has launched the New Dealership Experience platform. This new integrated software consists of everything you need to operate a dealership efficiently while delivering an unparalleled experience to your customers. Basically, everything working together, not separate, one system to run your dealership as opposed to 10. CDK developed it with an outside-in approach listening to dealers every step of the way.
You can learn more about CDK's dealership experience platform by visiting CDKglobal.com slash DXP or clicking the link in the show notes below. This episode is also brought to you by Witham, one of the largest dealership accounting firms in the country. Witham partners with dealers to help maximize revenue and cut costs, adding profits straight to the bottom line for dealers. And dealers, one of the easiest ways to add thousands to your bottom line is by working with Witham to submit for a warranty reimbursement rate adjustment. Witham has the insights and resources to quickly get parts and labor rate approvals across all manufacturers with zero disruptions to daily operations. Contact Witham today to get a free estimate on the potential profit you may be missing out on by visiting Witham.com slash warranty or clicking the link in the show notes below. Lastly, this episode is also brought to you by Cars Commerce. I'd like to thank Cars Commerce for coming on as a guest and also supporting this podcast.
Ron Andrews on the Car Deals For Guy podcast. Ron, welcome. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming on. Ron, we were just having a nice little chat here because I was a dealer and spy customer for my early days in the car business. And it's funny that you mentioned that you actually knew that. Go figure, right? Small world. But it's good to finally connect. Yeah, man, it's a little bit of nostalgia when you start pulling up some of our first clients, like websites. We used to celebrate every single website that we launched. We sent out these company emails, all that stuff. So I actually pulled up the old email that we sent out when we launched your website back in the day. Very cool to see a complete circle. You guys killed it. I was, we were, you know, we were growing as an independent group at the time. And, you know, I remember just looking for something higher-end. And then I came across DI and I, again, like the funny thing is I had no idea if what you were selling was a complete load of crap at the time, which it wasn't. I figured out, you know, by being a client, but I just remember seeing these like beautiful design images marketing and I was like, all right, I'm sold. And so it ended up working out very well for us because, you know, lots of people ended up, you know, trying to copy our design back then, but it was, it was cool, you know, come across you and to know that you were part of that early team, that's funny how all that works. Yeah, it's still the style, just like looking back on it.
You know, I still think we're very true to our roots in a lot of ways, like, you know, just crappy and just trying to think bigger. You know, naturally, like the industries evolved a lot. So, you know, we had to as well, but it was cool to be a part of that, you know, sort of early team that like bootstrapped the company and got it going and, you know, to see how it's evolved and to be a part of cars commerce. It's been an exciting journey and there's still so much ahead of us. Well, I hope you made a lot of money on acquisitions. That's what I can tell you. Okay. I see that smile. All right.
I think on that note, right, I want to start because your beginnings in the car business start way before dealer inspire. They start with you were working at an actual dealership which brought you to the industry. Take us through your background and, you know, how you got into this industry to begin with. Yeah, I, you know, started off as an intern, working for a small dealer group up in Northern Wisconsin. And I called that out because like, they were just as traditional as you could possibly imagine. And I had a friend that was working there as a service advisor and the owner was leaving one night and was walking through the service drive. And I guess somebody was complaining about their website saying they couldn't schedule an appointment or something along those lines. And at the time I was doing like some web development, working on WordPress, doing some content publishing from my university.
And my friend said, Hey, I got a guy that, you know, you might want to talk to you. He's doing some similar things. And he connected us and I did an internship over the summer and they said, Hey, you know, we'd love to keep you around and kind of teach you the business. Fortunately, I connected with the owner and built a great relationship with them. And, you know, from there it just kind of took off. I spent some time just kind of focusing on their marketing, but then they said, look, like, if you really want to continue to grow in the industry, like you're gonna have to sell some cars and you're gonna have to like learn how this business really works. So that's, you know, the kind of the path that I took.
I sold cars for a while. I was an internet sales manager for a long time. And then when the group was acquired by a 20 store group, I became the e-commerce director for overall, like the group operations. And somewhere along the line, you know, I met these guys, Joe Chura and Matt Cole, who were starting this little company called dealer inspire. And they're like, Hey, you should really come work for us.
And, you know, funny enough, at the time, like I was actually like really hesitant to do that. Cause look, car business pays really well. Like, you know, just, you gotta admit it. No doubt about it. This little startup was like, man, like, you know, we don't really know where this is gonna go. Like there's a lot of risk involved. And, you know, I remember having these moments where, you know, I've kind of flip flop and back and forth. Like what do I want to do? Came down, spent a day in the office, you know, with Joe and team. And no joke, we were building tables. Like before I even interviewed with Joe, like he was running late. So I was, I was building tables, setting up the office. This is like how early on this was.
And, you know, just realized that it was an amazing culture with some really great people. And it turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. 100%. You know, we got to get Joe on the podcast. That's overdue. We haven't had him on yet. And I think that would be a great, great story. So Joe, if you're listening, let's get you on.
So tell us, you know, what was it like going from the dealer world to the vendor side, right? I mean, you were, like you said, you were, you know, internet manager, e-commerce director. What was the, what was that change like for you? I think one of the things that sort of surprised me was, there's so many people on, you know, the vendor side, as it's called, that are hungry to learn more about how the business works. Like, what does it actually take to sell a car? How did dealerships make money? You know, like all of that, like nuance and detail, they just don't get, because so many folks like don't come from the dealer world into like the tech or like the marketing space.
And that's actually something that I've been, I've been really passionate about. We started like, you know, these things called like dealer talks and we started creating like little, you know, advisory panels and things for like, you know, our team members to actually talk to dealers, to talk to, you know, the sales managers and the people running stores to help educate them. And, you know, make sure that they understand all of the detail of like, we're running this marketing for you. We're building these websites for you. We're building these software solutions. But like, what does it actually mean for your business, right? Like how are you actually utilizing it? What are your pain points? What are your needs?
So that was probably the biggest surprise was just, you know, how much some of that stuff gets disconnected. Tell me about this concept of like modern retailing. Like, is that just a buzzword? What does this mean to you? You know, I remember with modern retail and digital retail and everything started coming, like get out of the forefront. I think this was like like 2017 or 2018. Every year you hear about it. Every year you hear about it. Like, our bottom was starting to become a household name. And, you know, I think everybody was like, oh God, I need to sell cars online. They're trying to figure out how do we do that?
You know, the interesting thing is, is like dealers have been selling cars online for longer than they give themselves credit for. Hashtag eBay Motors, right? Yeah. Or even just you look at the way that, you know, some salespeople interact with customers even through like email or text. I mean, it's like most of the buying process is happening through some form of technology, right? Like, but look, I learned how to sell cars on a four square. And I'm not that old, right? Like I told you, like I came up in a very traditional dealership, like the GSM. Tell us about the four square for anyone that's not familiar.
Ah, so basically the four square is just this like sort of simplistic, like, it almost looks like a tic-tac-toe where you're just building out, like, you know, vehicle costs, trade-in value, financing, and where you're presenting it to the customer kind of just allows you to like manipulate the deal in some ways to make sure that you're maximizing the profit for the dealership.
Going back to this, a concept of modern retailing, right? Like, what's happening? Look, you are right now. And I guess I should ask you this, right? VP of Biz Dev at Cars Commerce. But what does that actually mean? Like, what do you spend your days on, your time on? What are you doing nowadays? Yeah. So mostly I'm responsible for like revenue growth and innovation of dealer inspire and our Cars Commerce Media Network. So, you know, these two core pillars of our business that are really the growth engine for the company and allowing us, I think, to interact and strategize with our customers in more meaningful ways and utilize, like, our first-party audience, take advantage of more of our tech stack, really just to give dealers, like, the most efficient platform possible for them to be able to sell and acquire vehicles.
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So, today, right, if I'm a dealer listening to this, I have, let's say, $20,000 to spend a month or something or $30,000. You picked a number, right? I'm sure you get asked this from dealers because this is what you're working on. How do you respond to that? What do you tell dealers nowadays? Because marketing is the question that I get every single day, right? It's the big thing. I mean, 40,000 plus dealers or whatever in the country, right? Commodidized product, for the most part, I guess used maybe a little less so in new car. Obviously, commoditized. You're going to be competing on marketing a lot, right? So, how do you respond to a dealer that asks you? I have 30,000 to spend. What do I do? Obviously, knowing that you work at cars, commerce, but assuming you're giving here an objective kind of well-rounded point of view.
Yeah, you try to be as unbiased as you can, right? Look, it's interesting. I think back to the days where everybody just wanted to dump as much money into Google as you possibly could because you just knew like what the other result on the other end of it was going to be. You're going to get some clicks and you're going to get some leads and some phone calls. But now, you think about all the different platforms that like customers utilize on a daily basis, whether that's just in their personal lives or actually part of their shopping journey. I think the trick for most dealers is how do you diversify your media mix across all of those channels and utilize all of the tactics available within like the ad managers that bolt onto those things? That gets to be really, really complex.
Look, we work with some of the most innovative dealer groups. The largest dealer groups in the country. Some of them have like full-fledged like marketing departments that basically operate as an agency. Even they are recognizing that like it's this runaway train where like you have so many different places that you have to be advertising. You have so many different ad formats and things that you have to be utilizing. And then you got to layer an audience. You got to figure out creative like all of those things are tough to work out. And you need really strategic partners to make sure that you're maximizing all of those things.
So for me, I always try to balance like demand generation versus demand capture. Demand capture tends to be some of the more traditional things like on the digital side that dealers are used to, like paid social search engine marketing, paid search, et cetera. But demand generation is something that dealers in my opinion still are underinvested in. Those are things like video advertising, OTT, et cetera. Underinvested in? Dealers are underinvested in that. In most cases, I think dealers are underinvested, underutilizing some of the opportunities that they have with demand generation.
Video was always a place where dealers either bought like traditional linear TV, like cable as an example. But they really didn't do much online at all. And if they did, it was like some pretty simple like pre-roll campaigns as an example. Well, now, I mean, look, dealers can reach customers in so many different ways because they're cutting the cord, they're streaming across multiple platforms, and they can actually serve ads to those customers in much more cost-effective ways than they would just buy like traditional linear cable. The challenge with video is that you've got to figure out the creative, which that's always a little bit of a tough point for dealers. But then the other thing is audience because if you don't have an actual like audience that you're targeting, that cost can get really inefficient really quick.
So one of the things that we've really focused down is how do we let dealers utilize our first party data, our in-market shoppers, to activate media against. Now, some of that is like we just operate as the agency of record for some clients. Others, we just focus on channel-specific solutions, or we also have outcome-specific solutions. So if a dealer says, hey, I need to move EVs, or I need more trade-in leads, or I just need to focus on like truck shoppers as an example, like we can make sure that we're leveraging our solutions to meet those needs.
Yeah. What are you seeing in the market as like an ideal channel mix, right? Across dealerships and all the different areas where they can deploy dollars. What do you, in your perspective, right? What are you seeing as like the ideal mix right now? Yeah, I think you got to find a way to make sure that you're generating leads, but you're also generating traffic and as much like in-market shoppers to your site as you possibly can. It's funny, like we look at dealers sometimes and like month over month over month, they're growing traffic. It's at the point where they have 40, 50, 60,000 visitors coming to their site, but they're not selling anymore cars. Right? Like how do you make sure you don't sort of fall into that trap? I think in general, we try to say about 50% of your budgets should probably go towards demand capture, making sure that you're covering off on your paid search terms, your paid social, your inventory ads, all those kinds of things.
The other half of that should be built into demand generation. That can be things like a marketplace investment. That can be video. That can be display, some retargeting, all those types of things. That 50, 50 mix is usually a good starting point and then you can optimize from there. I think the trick is just making sure that again, you're maximizing some of those investments across all those channels and you've got a good partner on the other side that's really helping you build out the right campaigns and the right tactics to generate the results that you're looking for. Tell me more about like, what are you currently seeing in the market? One of the things that I was thinking about prior to this conversation and just doing research on you and your background, your position was the extent to which, you know, the amount of dealers that you come across and you have access to. And so I'd love to understand, right, like some of you're really deep inside of what you're seeing changing right now in the market and just deal our behavior, especially given the fact that we are in an environment with increasing inventories on the new side. Right, which we haven't really seen at the levels where today hasn't been like this for a couple of years. I actually think you cars, commerce put out to stand that new car inventories are up like 109% year over year. And so given all that, right, and we actually have to sell cars again, what are you seeing as best practices or changing behavior from a dealer's perspective?
Yeah, it's interesting time right now. I mean, look, rates are through the roof. We know that, which means dealers have increased floor plan costs on top of that. Like we got in into we're coming back. So it's kind of this, you know, really challenging mix that dealers have to navigate consumers are making decisions a little bit differently than they did a couple years ago. So, you know, that buying cycle has extended out so much further. And on top of that, then vehicle costs are rising as well. I think in 2019, the average cost of a new car was $38,000. This year, I think it's about to be 48,000. And that's down from a high of 50 in August of 2023. So, you know, all of those things are creating this perfect storm. And I think, you know, a partner of ours, CEO of a large dealer group, he kind of summed it up for me best. When I talked to him at Neda, he said, our salespeople are just out of practice. And I understand like where he's coming from there, you know, like every dealer that we've were working with, you know, for, you know, 2021, 2022 is telling us, look, I got more customers than cars. Like I got to figure out that solution. Well, now everything's kind of flipped back around.
So, you know, what we're seeing is dealers are particularly focused on how do they turn vehicles faster? How do they make sure that every single dollar that they're spending on advertising is as efficient and effective as it possibly can be because your marketing budget can't run away from you with all of your other costs increasing. And then how do we help them make sure that their salespeople are investing their time, effort, and energy in the right places and helping to maximize some of their skills said and how they're utilizing the technology just to make sure that they're going about their day to day in the most efficient way possible. Because look like, you know, they might be a little bit out of practice. And now we have more insights than ever. We have more technology and capabilities than ever to hopefully help them lean in and figure out like where do they really need to focus their time? How do they engage customers in the most meaningful way? And how do they understand that customer journey to make sure that when like that customer does, you know, engage with them or come into the store or whatever it might be, they don't feel like they're starting over. We have more insights on the customer journey than ever before.
I think one of the most painful parts of the carbine process for consumers when they feel like they're always kind of starting from scratch or getting handed off from one person to the next or they feel that friction in the buying process. What do you think about this like always on concept where customers are shopping 24-7? Dealership is obviously not open 24-7, but increasingly I'm speaking with dealers that are leveraging AI or official intelligence tools like that to speak with their customers. Generally speaking, what do you think about always on? How important is that to a dealer in general, to the industry, to be there for the customer in a timely manner, super quickly, but also potentially after hours. So when you think about lead capture, how important is that nowadays? Yeah, I think in general it's always been important. I think we neglected it a little bit as an industry, but it's absolutely critical now because I think all of our attention spans just continue to go down and we all want instant gratification for everything.
You think about the way dealers have always gathered leads and interacted with customers at that first point of interest. It was a lot of form on the website. You'll get an auto responder and then someone will get back to you at some point. Hopefully you could do that within 15 to 20 minutes, whatever that benchmark was from the OEMs. But in reality, we'd slip and we'd miss that pretty frequently. Customers just want answers to their questions as fast as possible. When you have somebody on your website that's shopping for a vehicle and they show some form of interest and engage with the dealership in some meaningful way, how do you take advantage of that in the moment? So this idea of being always on doesn't mean that you have to have a staff for a call center. That's 24, 7, 365. That's not realistic. But utilize some solutions that leverage AI and are able to interact with the customer in a way that as a general manager, you would feel comfortable with as if they were a part of your own staff. Sometimes it's just a matter of making sure that you can answer some questions on the spot or that you're not just telling the customer like, well, someone will get back to you when we can or come into the dealership and that's when we can have a conversation about some of those things. And just meeting the customer where they are.
In terms of actual tactics, are you seeing anything that is like, hey, this is where dealers are wasting the most money or these tactics? This is just not working for the industry. I think this should be shifted change done with anything on that end. Yeah, I look paid search, sort of the traditional like feed the Google machine. It has definitely shifted maybe the most over the last couple of years. I think in general dealers are realizing that you still need to be there, but you just got to be more effective and smarter with how you're investing those dollars. We talked a little bit about like media mix. If I looked 10 years ago, right, like you would have been 100% probably in Google, maybe, maybe like 90% if you started to do some things on social. And I think in general, you look at each individual ad platform and even some of like the marketplace as an example, how do you make sure that like your investment there is in the right spot and that you are leveraging all the capabilities to just to make sure that your budgets, your media dollars are spent in the most meaningful ways.
So I think that's probably the biggest thing that comes to mind is just seeing like less investment in paid search, a little bit more investment on some of the marketplaces and audience. Dealers are doing a lot right now also to like mine and organize and clean their first party data, which I think is really exciting as well because now you start to create an ecosystem where you're going to be able to make sure that you're doing a lot of money. So you're doing a lot of work in your system where you're advertising partners, you're reporting platforms, your CRM, your DMS, et cetera, can all have sort of a single place where your data sort of gets unlocked and you can layer in additional data, an additional first party audiences to really advertise more effectively, but also get a better idea of like what's working and what's not and measure our why in a more meaningful way. So I think that's a lot of the ways of CDPs and customer data platforms that you said leveraging data.
It's definitely something that I feel based on my conversations. I don't have a CDP myself, but I talk to a lot of people that do. I feel like it's still very early and the opportunity of what can be done with to improve the customer experience, communication, send more targeted offers and whatnot. So I think that's a relatively early innings and how that's all going to connect with an overall ecosystem of car buyers and sellers. I think that's going to be interesting to watch over the next couple of years, especially with AI rising so quickly, which makes things so much easier and more efficient. I see me, I see myself using this and you know, all the tools we're leveraging it here at Cardielship Guy just cuts out so much time and, you know, makes things really seamless. So we'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
Talk to me about cookies, right? Because this is something that I was doing some research on with the team and I'm personally not too familiar with just what's happening here and the rules and what's really the changing landscape of the Internet, right? Just sum it up, right? Cookies are potentially going away. I mean, you could explain this better. What are cookies? They're not the ones that grandma makes. Although I wish they were. They're, you know, those little things on the Internet that tell you something about someone visiting your website, privacy, and lots of these things are under eyes and cookies are sort of being, you know, diminished here. What does this actually mean, right? For dealers, consumers, like, why the hell should anyone care explain this to us?
Yeah, so very simply cookies are something built into the browsers that allows it to track the places that you go online and the interactions that you have on those websites. Advertisers can tap into those cookies, use some of that data to drive some of their advertising and the media that gets served against those users. That's about as simple as I can put it. Essentially, we're living in a cookie list world today. Google Chrome is the last browser to deprecate cookies that's gotten kicked down the road quite a bit. It looks like this summer is going to be kind of that final, you know, cut off where even Chrome now is no longer going to support cookies. But if you look at, like, Safari, look at Firefox, you know, all of those types of things have already moved beyond cookie, cookie targeting.
Essentially, what that means now for dealers is it's going to be a little bit more difficult for them to be able to reach and influence their shoppers or the folks that they're advertising against in is effective and efficient ways as they could in the past. So what now they're going to have to start thinking about is one, like audience activation and making sure that they're leveraging a really high quality first party data set that they can advertise against. And that can be a mix of things that, like, as an example, cars commerce can provide with our 28 million car shoppers that we have every month, or even data that the dealers can extract out of their CRM, their DMS, those types of things. You start to get a little bit more technical when you think about, like, identity resolution and device graphing and those types of things, because without cookies, it's much more difficult to match a shopper between the different devices that they might have within their household, or that they utilize as part of their shopping journey. It's also more difficult to track them across different platforms and across different websites. So if I jump between, like, interacting on Instagram versus then to YouTube or something along those lines, right? It's more difficult to kind of track that journey and make sure that you're influencing and serving media against that customer in a way that makes sense based on everything that you would historically know about that shopper.
So that's why we're seeing the rise of, like, customer data platforms. That's why identity resolution is such an important piece of the puzzle right now. And essentially, like, you know, there's a couple companies out there that I think are doing some really interesting things to help, not just dealers, but just advertisers in general, have solutions in place to make sure that they, they're not negatively impacted by the complete deprecation of cookies that are coming this summer.
So, so what's the bottom line, like, what does this all mean for an industry? Where are we headed next? I think where we're headed next is first party data is going to really be like sort of this goldmine that everyone's going to try to figure out how to mine and how to take advantage of. I think dealers in particular are going to have to be very careful about where they're placing their bets in the investments that they're making, because the same way when, you know, modern retail became a thing and all of a sudden everybody popped up selling a digital retailing tool, there wasn't a lot of guardrails and there wasn't a lot of knowledge and experience on what this all meant. And we're finding ourselves in a very similar space. You were at NADA a couple months ago.
You could not walk 10 feet without hearing somebody talking about first party data and, you know, customer data platforms and audience activation and all these types of things. And I think for a lot of the really savvy dealers that we get a chance to work with, they're slowing down a little bit. They're really like trying to lean in and make sure that they are fully educated on what all of that means. They're not jumping in and making any really large investments up front here to make sure that they make the right decisions that are going to set them up for the future, because it's going to take some infrastructure from an IT perspective to get this right. It's going to take some significant investment in their advertising and their media dollars to get that right. And, you know, any bad decisions right now could mean that you're essentially tearing down the house and rebuilding it at some point over the next 12 to 18 months. So I would just encourage you.
Take your time. Make sure that you got some good partners and some good advisors that are going to educate you on these subjects and these topics and make sure that you are working with some reputable companies. You're asking the right questions of like, how are you getting your audience? Where is that coming from? How often is it refreshed? What are the signals that you're getting that actually tell you that that audience you're running media against is truly in market for a car. All of those things just require some investigation to make sure that you're placing your bets in the right spot. Do you think like what's the net result here for consumers? Right. When you think about discontinuing to enter, you know, showrooms across the country and if you were buying a car in the next, you know, one, two, three years, right, is this simply just better communication and more targeted vehicles options, whatever, you know, service offer stuff brought to you earlier in the process. Like what is the actual endgame here? Yeah. So I don't know about you, man, but like I don't really mind like cookies that much. I'm sick of clicking. I love to be very clear. I love targeted ads.
Like give me a good target it had so I can do scroll on or whatever like some social platform and show me that, you know, that's shammy that cleans the high chair for the babies. And I can just reuse that and I don't need to waste like five rolls of bounty. I mean, I'm all in. Like I'm buying that. So I love a good, a good old target and add. I don't know why people hate them. I mean, listen, everyone knows everything about us anyways. I've given up everyone knows everything about me. Like at this point, give me the target and add, save me some time. Yeah. I think that's what most consumers feel. And we all want personalization like in our advertising that we get served or even like the buying experience that we have, especially if it's a large purchase.
Like, you know, you think about what it takes to buy a car. You know, we've certainly made it a little bit easier, but it's still a pretty significantly, you know, complex process. Personalization can help make that a lot easier. So look, I think what we're going to face is this, you know, sort of intersection where we all have to balance. Do we want personalization? Do we want targeted advertising or do we want like security and all these things? And there's sort of this point right now where I think there's this battle and it's this like seesaw going back and forth that we haven't quite figured out. Because even with like cookie deprecation, people have this idea that like, well, now that means that everything's really private. Well, you know, in reality, you know, there's, there's a lot of other ways that you can track customers or you can, you know, gather data on people, those types of things.
And you know, trying to put that puzzle together right now is a little challenging. But ultimately, I'm in alignment with you. We got to continue to lean into personalization. We have to make sure that ads are highly targeted that they're relevant for where a customer is like in their shopping journey. And that we're serving the right message that's going to help ultimately drive the type of engagement and the results that we want. That's going to get more complex. But again, I think, you know, there's some, there's some really great partners out there for dealers to be able to work with and help solve some of that. Yeah, appreciate all the work you're doing.
So, you know, before we wrap up, just what are you working on nowadays, right? What's on your mind? What are you working on with dealers and what's next? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the most fascinating things that we're working on is the identity resolution piece. You know, we know that. So essentially, you know, trying to de-anonymize the customers that come to the marketplace as well as, you know, like a dealer's website. We know that still a small percentage of customers ultimately like submit a lead. And that creates a lot of blind spots for dealers of like, well, what is this customer done as part of their shopping journey? What digital platforms have they interacted with? What advertising have they, you know, been served that ultimately got them to show up at the store, make a phone call, shoot a text, like whatever it might be, right? Like that customer journey is getting infinitely more complex every single day.
But the ability to actually get a new customer to make a phone call, shoot a text, like whatever it might be, right? And it's getting infinitely more complex every single day. But the ability to actually like track and understand all of those different touch points and understand what's working and what's not and what's ultimately driving ROI for, you know, the business is really difficult. So, you know, we've been really leaning in trying to make sure that we have a really good identity resolution strategy in place that's going to help us illustrate more of that to the dealer to. Not only show them the value of our platform and our solutions, but also just help them connect the dots.
We believe that dealers are still wasting an awful lot of money in some of the technology and advertising investments that they're making. We want to help our dealers be more efficient. We want to make it easier for them to be able to sell service and acquire vehicles. And most importantly, we want to make it easy for the customer to be able to buy or sell a car from a dealership. All of that, you know, is difficult. But if we can help string together what that customer journey looks like, if we can make it more personalized, more targeted. And if we can tell that story to dealers and give them the reporting and insights that they need, we believe that that solves both some of the pain points for our dealer customers, but also for the shoppers and the consumers that they need to interact with. And they need to provide a great experience for them.
Well stated, my friend, Ron Andrews, this was great. I appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights. A lot of moving pieces right now on the media landscape, but I'm excited to see you continue working on this and seeing what unfolds. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a great conversation. Thanks for coming on Ron. And we'll also throw your link in the show notes below your contact info. So if anyone wants to get in touch with you, they can get it right there. Ron Andrews, thanks for coming on. Yes, sir. Thank you. All right. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Please give the podcast a rating. Consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes for links to what we talked about. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you guys next time.