I wasn't particularly impressed with the commercials. I agree with Jeff, they were "average at best".

What did impress me was the fact that Cars.com ran two of them. I didn't see any for Autotrader.com. (If there were any for Autotrader I must have been away from the TV). To me, this is indicative of the online classified marketplace. The more dealers I speak with, the more have been signing up with Cars.com and more have been cancelling or downgrading Autotrader.com. It's obvious Cars.com is making a real run at capturing more market share, and I think they're doing it effectively. A few years ago it was Autotrader.com that was branded EVERYWHERE. Now I feel like I'm seeing more Cars.com branding. I know Autotrader.com likes to do most of their stuff during the summer months, so we'll have to see the numbers by the end of the year.

McCoy,

If you like what I say, it'll be constructive....if not, it's BS, as Alex refers to it.

Okay, here's my take on the two cars.com ads (and I would have the same concerns if they had been AutoTrader.com ads): What was the point?

If, as the ad says, Confidence Comes Standard when one uses cars.com, the shopper would have no need to bring along an elaborate Plan B. In my opinion, it implied exactly the opposite: the shopper wasn't very confident in cars.com, so he felt it necessary to still bring along the medicine man and the psychotic fire dude.

If I ruled the cars.com advertising world, I would have had the customer talking to his Plan B characters at home, explaining to their pouting faces why they couldn't come along to the dealership like they used to when car buying time came around (showing flashbacks of previous times when Plan B was used), because he no longer needs them now that he has used cars.com to do his research and found the right car at the right price. THAT would have exemplified confidence on the part of the cars.com user. Maybe at the end have the medicine man shrink the fire-guy's head right after the shopper leaves for the dealership, "I told you not to tell him about cars.com!" Then the slogan: Confidence Comes Standard . Whatever, just thinking out loud.

At any rate, I thought for the nearly $6 million paid, the message should have been clearer and more forceful. That's my $0.02 cents worth, and I won't even charge cars.com for my advertising consulting here.

For their sake, I hope the return is worth the investment. Time will tell.

These two commercials are the kickoff of Cars.com's 200 million dollar 08 advertising campaign. The commercials will be followed by 6-8, maybe more, newer commercials throughout the year. Since the game was the most-watched Super Bowl ever with 97.5 million viewers and second most-watched American television broadcast ever, I think the effort Cars.com is putting forward for its participating dealers has to be applauded. I do work for Cars.com/Tribune, so I am interested in what everyone on DealerRefresh thought of them. Even biased Lightnup, although I am sure he will have nothing constructive to say.

Big Mistake on aols part vast as the worst of all car dealers using their
services nothing but nightmares to deal with .They advertize cars at low
ball prices And dont even have the car when you get there,isnt
that against the law ,Bait and switch?

It occurs to me (like most in this blog, I'm sure) that the dealers actually "own" the inventory and photos...not Cars.com or AutoTrader.

Therefore, anyone who can "aggregate" on behalf of the dealer could easily show "all" the inventory. This benefits the dealer, of course, who wants as many as possible to see their inventory and provide the contact info. As an in market buyer, I'm very dissatisfied with the current search aggregation sites. Hard to use and slow (my $.02...you may not agree). If Vast can provide fast/easy search with photos and prices, they will quickly make a serious dent.

I do like their simple interface and fast search...despite the buzzwords.

Without breaking out my tin foil hat, it is interesting this relationship has eventuated when a former AOL executive is the CEO at Autobytel/MyRide powered by VAST.

When I was at ABTL we were under the impression this was to be exclusive to ABTL. Even then they were touting that MyRide would have the largest used car inventory on the Web. Interesting now to see it's basically everyone other than 'Trader and Cars will now have a huge used car "vehicle" to sell to their dealers.

BTW, when I was at ABTL pay for performance meant the more you pay the higher in the waterfall your listings will come up.

Jason,
I don't know how to tell you man but...

Your site needs a makeover from one of those marketing "touchey feely" GUI gurus (and so does mine!!). This is not a flame, just a comment from a peer in the trenches.

Joe

sorry - as soon as I see the "rich" / "robust" (and similar phrases), I immediately ignore everything else..
Coming from a programming and IT consulting background, nothing sets me off more then vendors and consultants using these absurd nonsense terms..
"with our rich interface and robust feature set blah blah blah blah"....
I AM impressed with their technology - but they do it a huge dis-service by resorting to such stereotypical IT marketing fluff..

The big thing that vast brings to the table is their spidering technology. Its this technology that scours the internet and pulls inventory from all sorts of sites. This is why they have 3 million cars.

I met with Vast last week at NADA and came away really, really impressed. Their partnerships have the potential to be a major disrupter in the traditional automotive sites. It is so rare to see a company have more than vaporware - most of the stuff I see like this is really easy to poke holes in and Vast was rock solid. This is going to get interesting!

Hmm... if I remember correctly Vast.com business model is paid search placement... i.e large classified providers pay extra to get the listings up high in the results... much like Yahoo organic placement... I wonder if same "robust optimization technology" will be in play at AOL.com...

man... how do I get the 'in' like Jeff? LOL

Good job Jeff

Very insightful and makes sense. Thanks again Jeff for keeping us updated on the up and coming trends in the market!

Great interview. I'm glad that vertical search is beginning to level the playing field in terms of classified market share.

That's a brilliant idea!

Great job as usual Jeff! Keep up the great work!

While it may not look good for myride on the service, the model is not bad. Searching for a vehicle on a portal is not rocket sciece. The market from a consumer standpoint is saturated. You have an abundance of choice. More choice is good but what will make something stand out is the content outside of the search results, the search criteria and accuracy and the overall efficiency. That's one thing that I think Vast has done well.

The social network/ user review part is going to gain more and more momentum. I don't think it'll be dealer rater... maybe carfolks will have the content and model. But maybe, just maybe myride will hang on long enough to be the dark horse winner?

Joe I'm not so sure that money is all is needed. Sites that are easy to use are successful, and very few car shopping sites are. Dealers shouldn't have to put their URLs in images in order to help customers find their websites. Car sites don't understand tracking funnels so they blackout features instead of managing them properly.

Garbage in, garbage out. This is the same shit I can get on any other site with brighter colors.

All this money being made (or lost) with a 'nothing-new' effort. It sickens me.

C'mon CS,
It sure puts a light on how much cash they have to dump in it to become an "established" YACWFUC.

-YET
-ANOTHER
-COPRORATE
-WEBSITE
-FOR
-MARKETING
-USED
-CARS

They need a big media partner... BAD.

Meh. The meta tags issue is a small one. Sites like this have little content that search engines are interested in.

Does anyone know why MyRide.com uses the Vast API instead of the Autobytel database? I sure don't.

Does anyone know why the search box on the homepage doesn't search the "research" and classifieds sections of the site? I sure don't.

Joe your graph is funny to look at, but would you really expect a new site to compete with an established authority?

myride.com, should be mymynoaudienceatall.com

To think autotrader.com was scared of this concept! Shows you how in tune they really are! LMAO!

myride = myouch


Bet there is some boardroom drama going on over there.
The suits who pushed this MyRide drivel thru are now back peddling and talking about "longer time lines" to mature.

Actually, I haven't been to myride in months. Looks like they're shedding the street attitude community angle and going more corporate. It's a better fit for them. The Problem is that this space is quite full. (kbb, edmunds, etc..)

We had Eric Cotter, Product Manager of MyRide.com weigh in before, Eric, you still with us? Where are you taking MyRide Now?

Boy it would have been nice if this sale would have happened 3 months ago when the company had their last RIF, costing 40 people their jobs.

It's no secret Autobytel is losing money every quarter so this sale will give them a few more quarters in which to continue losing money. MyRide was a catastrophe last summer when they tried to launch it. A perfect case of how outsourcing ends up costing you more money than you could have ever spent doing it right the first time.

Jeff, you're spot on when you speak to how frustrating the MyRide site is. They so want it to be the next Facebook. Plus how is it supposed to drive more traffic when no one outside the industry knows about it. They spent 10's of thousands of dollars promoting it in the automotive press, but none of those eyeballs are going to ever be an organic Autobytel lead.

In any event, hopefully this will prove a good move for AVV.

MyRide.com = YACWSTTLC.
You can just feel the Suits at autobytel.com running it. It lacks "attitude".

YACWSTTLC
Yet
Another
Corporate
Web
Site
Trying to
Look
Cool


Gotta love DR!
Joe