Tell us a bit about yourself, your background and how you came to be at PHD.
I’ve been in the industry for about 10 years. My current role is leading the Volkswagen and Porsche accounts at PHD, where I joined as a senior manager back in 2017. I primarily look after planning and account management.
My previous role was with another agency looking after the BMW and Mini account, leading on performance activity.
Tell us about your history and experience of working with TLA.
I started working on automotive in my second year in media and TLA was one of the first partners I was exposed to. TLA wasn’t about treating people as numbers to make money. It was about genuinely trying to help consumers navigate what is a really complex marketplace and giving them the choice and ability to evaluate the right brand and the right car for them.
That passion for a consumer-led approach was something I’ve carried through everything that I’ve done since.
When you couple that with genuine business results and the ability to back up what you’re saying, they helped me look really good in front of my clients! I was able to deliver vast quantities of leads and prospects that their retail network could try and convert to sale.
TLA has never been about ticking a box. They request feedback on the data to understand the impact of what they deliver. And they’re the first to find a way of making it better.
You had an impactful role in the concept phase of our Quality Arrivals tool. What was the inspiration behind the solution?
This is a metric we devised for our clients a few years back and it’s based on consumer behaviour. Legacy metrics, such as test drive requests are still really important and are a key step in most consumers’ journey to buying a car. But it’s often one of the last steps they take and there are lots of other steps that are key signifiers of consideration or evaluation for a brand that happen first.
TLA was sat on a wealth of data that it was using to qualify interest before engaging with a prospect before they became a lead. Together, we recognised the potential for prospects to be engaged [by an OEM’s retail network] far earlier.
If you optimise everything to the bottom of the funnel, you’ll drive a decent amount of cost-efficient leads into your business. But ultimately the aperture for that is gonna be much smaller. If you roll things back and have a phased approach, you can meet consumers at different stages of their purchase journey – which is so fragmented as there’s so much choice.
You’ve got more data signals that you can act upon as they pass through that journey and you should be keeping more people in your funnel, conquesting more people from funnels and driving more sales as a result.
The past few years have been unprecedented. What do you think have been the most significant challenges impacting customer acquisition?
Brexit, COVID and the war in Ukraine have all affected production lines, the cost of materials, access to parts and ultimately the supply of vehicles that are passing into markets.
The ability to sell cars has been the biggest challenge for any car brand. But within that, different brands have taken different approaches. Keeping a presence with consumers is really important for a brand’s success, especially when there’s so much choice.
But being responsible with the money that you’re spending is too. As an agency, we’ve had constant scrutiny of budgets. The real challenge has been knowing what the right thing to take away is.
That’s a really difficult challenge. TLA’s been a really good partner throughout this because they’ve understood the market and haven’t been under any illusion that it’s gonna be very challenging for them to make a case to keep driving leads into retailers when retailers haven’t got any cars to sell.
That’s why the proliferation of the type of support TLA can give brands with the example of quality arrivals is really important. Because this isn’t about necessarily selling a car right now. This is about engaging with a prospect when they might be passively evaluating. They might be three, four or five months away from the purchase. That’s one example of how TLA has taken on board the market factors and responded.
TLA are market experts within automotive and have more data, more specialism and more insight across the entire automotive industry than most can claim. They understand consumer behaviour. They know the challenges that the different brands are facing and can provide that council to agencies and brands as well.
We aren’t seeing as many of the glitzy and glamorous things getting through on media plans anymore. We’re getting a lot more scrutiny over every single number and being challenged to quantify the business impact of what we do.
The second big thing impacting the industry has been real growth in the uptake of electric vehicles. Understanding the differences between how consumers research and navigate the path to purchase for EVs compared to traditional vehicles is important.
There’s going to be an even bigger explosion in the product ranges that brands offer within the EV space. For the majority, it’s their big bet for the future.
The simplicity of the platforms EV are built on means they’re more like pieces of tech than they are traditional cars. It’s a different type of product. They might not require the same level of after-care because there are fewer things that can go wrong with them so long as the computer and software work. So brands may see loyalty as the most important way of driving success. Finding ways to keep them engaged will be a big focus for many.
The final challenge would be the switch to direct-to-consumer. The traditional OEM model is changing and major brands are switching to this agency model. The way they operate might take five years to demonstrably change but the way they’re thinking has already shifted.
They might only have a 5% of their overall sales mix coming from direct-to-consumer next year. But 90% of their thinking is going behind direct-to-consumer. That’s because marketing departments have never had sales targets on their heads, and now they do. So they’re making moves to protect themselves and ensure they have the tools at their disposal to achieve their performance targets.
The ability to forecast, measure, and ultimately sell cars is what we as agencies are going to get tasked with doing and we’re going to be asking the same of our partners.