Cox Auto Trader Makes Strategic Moves to Improve Online Automotive Advertising Business

[Shameless Plugmuch]

Dear Scott,

Do you sell flowers at funerals too? Seriously, anybody that was considering your site just stopped.

SP

 

[Scott Simmons]

O.K. SP. We are just trying to provide an affordable option to dealers in this tough economy instead of continuing to raise rates among other things and that should take us out of consideration? O.K. SP

 

[Cox Employee]

so, "about to be jobless" - how did you find out what your generous severance would be? We don't get our until next Tuesday. I like how the news releases are really missing how whole store... and what a store it is for a multi-billion dollar company still in existence...

 

[Mike (blog)]

Scott,

Shameless plug for sure. Not only that but what value will your site bring to dealers? Your site name is too long, I would rather pay cars.com even if its 5 times as much then carsfosale. No point in being cheap if you can't produce good results.

Mike

 

[Scott Simmons]

O.K. Mike. Thanks for the advice. We will try to do better this year. Produce good results. Get shorter name.
Thank you Michael.

 

[about to be jobless]

My unethical, corrupt GED-holding Regional gave me the news about losing my job over the phone. He said the severence would be similar to the packages given to the AT employees when their market here was shut down a couple months ago. He said preliminarily that I will get one week and it will be an average of my weekly commissions so I have a good idea of what that is looking like. I will know more next week.

 

[about to be jobless]

To "cox employee" what is the average your reps were billing weekly?

 

[Amazed]

This is amazing to me. I can understand why Auto Mart Magazine was not profitible with their heavy discounting but there had to be profitible markets that could be salvaged and kept alive?

I have to believe that Dominion is next and if they are already suing Cox for distribution- I think the writing is on the wall! The whole internet only stategy seems like having all the eggs in one basket for these companies.

Also with all of these companies killing their print and pushing us all onto their websites - major saturation! Their internet rates are going to sky rocket and my ad budget is going to explode. I wish all of you media people well- very sad to see so many loose jobs and treated terribly.

 

[HORRIBLE NEWS]

To comment on the rest of the bad news the rest who are staying on with Auto trader Latino formerly Auto Mercado will later be let go as soon as they are used for there leads and contacts....

 

[Mattie]

I sympathize with those impacted by this layoff. I believe Cox will cull as much business as they can from the print reps they took on and will unload autotrader.com next year once they've rid the print part of the business to make it that much more desirable. I wouldn't be suprised if autotrader.com pared down it's field sales force mid year this year, they can't possibly need that many sales reps in this economy in all markets, save the major ones.