The way that people go about buying cars is shifting. Consumers no longer walk into the showroom and leave it up to the salesman to give them the details. With so many online tools available, buyers are taking things into their own hands.

A 2016 report from the Harvard Business Review notes, “The average U.S. car shopper now spends 11 hours online and only 3.5 hours offline, including trips to dealers, doing research.” Even more telling, 53% of buyers would consider buying a new car online, with no dealership or salesman interaction at all.

As a result of this changing landscape, dealerships must adapt. Although we can’t give buyers everything ahead of time, we can give them the information they need and get them excited about purchasing a car. That’s where video comes in.

Video can be a great way to target potential buyers and, more importantly, it can take the showroom beyond the dealership and directly to the consumer. Let’s take a look at how.

Keep focus on the key features

According to a study in Automotive News, 52% of auto enthusiasts watch videos to evaluate vehicle performance, and 42% of shoppers search inventory on a dealership website as a result of watching online video.

The takeaway? Video works when done right.

Video provides dealers an opportunity to immerse the consumer in all aspects of the vehicle—whether it’s the interior features, the various exterior options, or footage of safety tests, consumers can see things that matter to them without having to go to the dealership.

Another benefit of video is that it’s flexible. Full-length videos can be trimmed in order to feature the most important parts of the video, fit a specific marketing channel, or target a key demographic.

For example, a video focused on safety would appeal most to mothers, while a video touting the vehicle’s horsepower may be more applicable to auto enthusiasts and young adults.

Different features are important to different buyers, and video allows dealers to show the right features to the right buyer using sight, sound, and motion.

Bring the vehicle to the consumer

Video can make the buying process both easier and more immersive for consumers, even when they aren’t in the dealership.

How? The introduction of virtual test drives has permanently altered the process of buying a car.

Dealerships are now able to give drivers a feel for a car and its features without them ever having to step foot in the vehicle. Additionally, virtual tours help give buyers a 360-degree view.

While on the path to purchase, consumers can browse a variety of websites or social channels that will provide information and visual aids for the cars they are considering.

Instead of waiting for a salesperson’s assistance, consumers can take to their computer or mobile device and learn more about their purchase through explainer videos and information.

With virtual test drives and tours, consumers discover what build, features, and color they are looking for before stepping inside the dealership.

Use social media to spread your message

Social media is one branch of this growing tree. Users show their personality on social media, and tend to let their guard down when scrolling and absorbing the advertisements that appear on their screen.

Buying a car represents a major financial investment, and consumers have grown more comfortable coming to their own independent conclusions by researching on mobile.

According to research conducted by Facebook, 71% of consumers will take to their mobile device during the process of purchasing a car.

Furthermore, a report from Marketing Profs states that nearly thre-quarters of millennials say they are more influenced in their buying decisions by social media recommendations than TV ads.

Dealerships can use social media channels to showcase what the buyers want. These channels are able to target users with specific videos that are engineered to take advantage of the platform they appear on.

For example, YouTube is best suited for showcasing walk-arounds and vehicle previews, while Twitter is most effective when short videos are prioritized and pushed to the top of a targeted user’s feed.

Personalized videos are the precursor to personalized experiences that will stick with the user, and social channels are where they are most accessible.

The bottom line

The buyer journey no longer starts in the showroom. It starts at the consumer’s own pace, and it starts on the web. As a dealer, it’s your responsibility to stay with your consumers step by step.

Video marketing and everything that comes with it can make this process simpler. By taking your showroom digital, it becomes more accessible, flexible, and persuasive with the use of sight, sound, and motion.

In this day and age, those two qualities are priceless.

Erik Schear is an advertising veteran with over 20 years of sales experience. As Eyeview’s VP of sales for auto, travel, and new markets, Erik manages various components of Eyeview’s sales team nationwide and enables Eyeview’s partners to achieve ROI with their video advertising spend.

The president’s demands for more negotiations amounted to his fourth position in three days on the health care bill. He began the week supporting a Senate effort to overhaul the law, but when it became clear late Monday that Republicans would fall short of the votes for that measure, he abruptly declared that lawmakers should simply repeal the law and start from a “clean slate” on an effort to replace it — an approach he had previously ruled out.

Facing still more opposition for that strategy, he said on Tuesday that Republicans should “let Obamacare fail” and blame it on Democrats. But by nightfall, Mr. Trump was scheduling a lunch with Republicans at the White House, designed to pressure them to redouble their efforts to find agreement on a full-scale replacement, back where he started.

Mr. Trump usually steers clear of policy details and has grown impatient with the painstaking behind-the-scenes bargaining that has marked the health care negotiations. But he said on Wednesday that he was hopeful that the Senate would deliver a bill that he could sign.

“I think that we’re going to do O.K. — we’re going to see,” he said in an interview in the Oval Office, just after his lunch with senators in the State Dining Room.

He was blunt about the obstacles and the difficulty of the negotiations.

“It is a very narrow path winding this way,” Mr. Trump said. “You think you have it, and then you lose four on the other side because you gave” concessions to another faction of senators.

“It is a brutal process,” he added. Mr. Trump conceded that the very nature of what he had promised to do — eliminate Mr. Obama’s health care program, which serves millions of Americans — made the effort an uphill slog.

“Once you get something, it’s awfully tough to take it away,” Mr. Trump said.

There is still little evidence that returning to the negotiating table on a replacement will win over the four Republicans who have declared their opposition.

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The health care bill drafted by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, would repeal major provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including penalties for people who go without health insurance; make deep cuts in projected Medicaid spending; and establish a new system of subsidies to help people buy private insurance.

The measure has faced resistance both from conservatives concerned that it did not go far enough in eliminating the current law and from moderates who feared it would lead to losses in insurance coverage, stingier plans and higher health costs.

Mr. Trump dispatched administration officials to Capitol Hill on Wednesday night to lobby wavering Republicans who have not yet pledged to support the measure, some of whom have publicly aired their reservations. Mr. McConnell said the goal was to get them to agree to vote next week on a procedural motion simply to open debate on the bill, but the final language of that measure had not yet been determined.

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“There’s no way that I, or anybody else, could prevent members from having amendments that any 51 of us can pass and change the bill,” Mr. McConnell said. “But we cannot have a debate until we get on the bill.”

The Trump administration also offered the insurance industry an olive branch, approving the payment of a month’s worth of subsidies to insurers that help poor customers with out-of-pocket health care expenses.

The president has never been completely engaged with the health care repeal-and-replace efforts. He was largely absent from House attempts to craft a bill earlier this year, weighing in at the end when the effort appeared on the verge of collapse to issue an ultimatum.

Then, too, he initially reacted with angry resignation to the failure by House Republicans to reach consensus — “It’s enough, already,” he said after leaders scrapped a vote because they could not muster a majority for the measure — only to change course later, urging lawmakers to strike a compromise, and celebrating lavishly in the Rose Garden when they did.

He has occasionally cajoled members of Congress, primarily through his Twitter feed, but he has seemed hesitant at best. White House advisers have been divided on how involved he should be, leaving Mr. Trump to weigh in sporadically. And his impulse has been to keep members of Congress at an arm’s length, reverting to blaming and threatening them when it appears they are not bowing to his preferences — and even privately criticizing their work product, as he did when he called the House-passed bill “mean.”

“I think it’ll be very bad for them” if they don’t support the health bill, Mr. Trump said of lawmakers in the interview on Wednesday.

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At lunch, Mr. Trump used a combination of humor and thinly veiled threats to pressure senators to do what he was asking.

“Look, he wants to remain a senator, doesn’t he?” Mr. Trump said of Senator Dean Heller, a Nevada Republican who was seated beside him and who has been outspoken about his concerns with the proposal. “I think the people of your state, which I know very well, I think they’re going to appreciate what you hopefully will do.”

In private, Mr. Trump was sharper, according to a person briefed on the closed-door lunch, telling Mr. Heller that if he opposed the health care effort, he would lose the Republican nomination for his Senate seat, which would bar him from seeking re-election next year. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussion was private.

Mr. Trump also alluded to two Republicans, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Mike Lee of Utah, who had come out against the measure Monday night, saying he had been “surprised” because the senators were “my friends.”

“My friends — they really were and are,” he said. “They might not be very much longer, but that’s O.K.”

Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, said Mr. Trump was “trying to add momentum back to a process” that had stalled.

“We’ll see,” he said. “I like to think that we walked out with a sense of momentum.”

At the White House, senators said, they discussed a proposal added to the Senate bill at the request of Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, that would allow insurers to sell policies that violate the Affordable Care Act if they also sell policies that comply with the benefit mandates and other requirements of the law.

A study by the Department of Health and Human Services, cited by Mr. Trump, said the proposal would increase enrollment and reduce premiums in the individual insurance market. But those figures are at odds with projections by insurance actuaries outside the government, who have called Mr. Cruz’s proposal unworkable and warned it would lead to higher premiums and terminations of coverage.

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Videos are a tool that many marketers count among the most effective in their arsenal. But, there are certain rules that need to be followed to drive engagement.

One of those rules is that shorter, sharper bursts of video content tend to be more effective than longer ones.

But a new study by video marketing automation platform TwentyThree has unearthed some interesting findings about how people consume video content. Perhaps the main takeaway is that when it comes to video, shorter is not always best.

TwentyThree’s data comes from 300 marketing teams, 1.5 million videos, 1.7 billion impressions and 650 million video plays.

Main findings

While 80% of the videos produced for, and shared on, social media are under 5 minutes, they account for less than a third of video engagement.

It is in fact, longer pieces of video content that have a higher rate of engagement. Videos longer than 15 minutes accounted for 50% of all the engagement recorded, but are only 8% of all the video content produced.

You could put this down to longer videos giving people more time to engage, which would seem to show that tracking video success is about much more than the number of impressions. But, the data also indicates the platform the content is viewed on has an impact.

When it comes to owned media, 66% of people watch an average of 03:56 minutes of video. This compares to 23% of people watching videos with an average length of 00:58, and 14% watching videos of an average length of 00:20 on Facebook.

The success of owned media video content continues into email marketing. The study found that click-through rates increase by 62% when a video is placed in the thumbnail of the email campaign.

Another interesting finding that the data threw up is that it appears that the majority of live video conversions occur prior to the stream even beginning. 79% of conversions occur before the live stream begins, compare to 59% before in-player videos.

The lessons seem to be that marketers focus should be on creating meaningful engagements rather than trying to simply thrust content in front of the faces of as many people as possible. Also, the need for different approaches and expectations for different channels. Social media maybe a place to catch attention and pique interest, but owned media is the place to go into detail and really drive engagement. 

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Ever since programmatic advertising came into vogue within the digital realm, marketers and agencies have been hustling to derive maximum value using the combination of digital real-time targeting and outcome-based measurement together with premium video inventory.

This application for ‘television’ has historically been more of a pipe dream, and we’ve been talking about it for years—but the future is NOW and we are finally getting our hands dirty as TV is finally catching up to digital (certainly not there yet, but progress).

Adding Automation and Targeting to Traditional TV

We like to call this progress ‘Advanced TV’, which is defined in three categories:

● Programmatic television is the automation of linear TV media buying. This combines the use of data for an index-based selection of dayparts, networks and programs. Some call any data-based buying programmatic, which confuses the matter. That said, the TV industry is very cautious with this approach having witnessed how programmatic was used to drive price down and commoditize digital inventory.
● Connected television is when brands buy ads during over-the-top (OTT) and connected platforms such as Roku and Apple TV. Although this is one-to-one based advertising, robust targeting and measurement is not quite there yet due to the lack of cookies and the non-standardization of device IDs. The goal is to convert to IP and this should be a much richer solution within the next year.
● Addressable television refers to household-level, linear TV advertising, which allows brands to target the right home with the right message. While there are limitations due to set-top-box technology, this category does allow for creative versioning in TV delivery for the first time, allowing advertisers to send personalized ads to specific audience segments.

With the data nuances available in advanced TV, we also need to move the conversation beyond simply data and targeting. With creative driving at least 50% (in some cases 70%) of the campaign’s sales impact, creative personalization needs to become a major part of the conversation.

Addressable TV Is the Best of Both Worlds

While all advanced TV approaches offer marketers a suite of benefits, addressable TV is the most effective execution because it combines the precise targeting of digital with the highest quality viewing experience.

By applying digital tools to the buying process, addressable advertisers can be much more efficient with their television spend. Rather than wasting millions of dollars on ads that will be shown to every person watching a given program, a beauty brand could spend significantly less to reach only a specific group of women in the market for that product. On top of that, that brand could segment the group of women into different categories, such as heavy mascara buyers versus heavy nail polish buyers and send ads highlighting the different products to the respective segments. Returning versus new customers can be targeted as well.

Addressable TV allows marketers to reach consumers in a far better environment than they’d find online. Whereas a digital video viewer might be in a rush to get back to whatever they were doing a moment ago, television viewers are more committed to sticking around and watching premium TV content. This creates a more engaging viewing environment, which has always been a draw of traditional TV advertising. Remember, TV is also immune to the recent digital issues around unsafe advertiser environments—you absolutely know what you’re getting here.

However, one of the best components of addressable is the ability to measure impact such as website conversion, foot traffic and actual sales lift. Using third-party measurement partners, marketers can know for certain that the people who saw their ads actually went on to buy their products. In short, marketers now know if their advertising is working. Take that Wanamaker!

Better Together: Digital Video and Addressable TV

The best way for marketers to begin using addressable TV is by including it in a cross-screen campaign with digital video. By pairing an addressable TV buy with digital video, advertisers can get television’s halo effect while simultaneously building scale with less expensive online inventory. Together, these two formats produce a cost-effective, multi-channel campaign that delivers excellent return on ad spend. What’s even more powerful is the application of real-time digital results to television. While TV outcome measurement is not real-time, we can take the immediate learnings from digital and nimbly apply to TV—which creatives are working best, refining data targets, etc.

Beyond giving brands more bang for their buck, the combination of digital video and addressable TV enables advertisers to implement a more precise, more sophisticated marketing strategy. Instead of choosing between the lean-back environment of television and the lean-in environment of digital, brands can mix and match based on what they are trying to achieve with each customer. And because addressable television allows advertisers to target people at the household level, marketers can prevent themselves from oversaturating a single consumer across TV and digital. Once the integrated campaign is finished, marketers can measure performance across both channels, allowing them to better understand the cumulative impact of their holistic video marketing strategy.

And, addressable and advanced TV are just getting started. As the technology continues to develop, we’ll be able to learn more about optimal frequency and sequence of cross-screen campaigns. Imagine when TV measurement becomes ‘real-time’ like digital—the practice of cross-screen optimization will become a reality (maybe we can even get Facebook and Google to play with us here).

For now, brands and agencies should seize the value that’s already available and begin experimenting with integrated, cross-screen campaigns. It won’t be long before advanced TV is just as important to a successful media plan as its analog predecessor.

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