An article by Julien Samarcq, Director BU Data – Digital at Axys
In a rapidly changing automotive sector, driven by the structural decline in passenger vehicle sales and the rapid rise of electric vehicles in Europe, marketing departments are caught between short-term pressure on the volume of leads, massive investments in TV and a growing demand on the part of their management to provide tangible proof of return on investment. As customer journeys fragment and measurement tools show certain limits, the challenge is no longer to measure everything, but to measure what really matters and focus on the increment of marketing actions on sales and margins, by aligning marketing, commerce and finance.
Auto marketing more fragmented than ever, but a measure that remains in the lead era
In just a few years, the way of buying a car has radically evolved, giving rise to a multitude of possible scenarios, with the advent of new levers and channels: influencers on social networks, test videos on YouTube, visits to virtual showrooms. Contact with a dealer is made at the end and we see that seeing the vehicle and interacting with the seller remains essential. Where, yesterday, TV and a few print media structured most of the journey, it is now split between platforms, devices and players, from the manufacturer to the distribution group. However, marketing measurement in the automobile industry still often remains focused on measuring TV GRPs, digital impressions, site visits and, above all, leads (forms, calls, test requests), hoping that a sufficient volume will statistically end up being transformed into registrations.
Why do auto CMOs struggle to prove the contribution of their media mix?
This fragmentation of the media landscape and the complexity of the journeys make “data-driven” management difficult. It is difficult in the field to measure in a deterministic manner the real contribution of marketing investments to the final sale. The tools themselves have their limits. Marketing mix modeling (MMM) remains essential to estimate the historical contribution of the different channels and help decide between TV, radio, digital and network activations. But it is essentially retrospective, poorly adapted to the granularity of creations or formats, and will always struggle to perfectly cover all sources of sales, particularly in an omnichannel environment. A recent BCG study, carried out among more than 200 European and American companies, shows low satisfaction with marketing measurement, even though ambitions are high. Respondents would like prospective simulations to test different allocation scenarios between touchpoints and brands.
At the other end of the spectrum, digital attribution models struggle to reconnect the actions of a digital journey to real sales, unless they invest in data architectures that bring together DMP, CRM and DMS. This architecture could have seen the light of day with the agency model between the manufacturer and the distributor, but this model is progressing slowly according to the manufacturers, due to regulatory and contractual resistance among distributors.
Faced with this observation, there is a great temptation to conclude that “TV is not measurable” or that “we will never really know” what sells. Other industries (CPG, tech, retail) show us that answers exist, provided that we make changes in the way we manage.
Two breakthroughs to make to get out of “blind piloting”
The first break is conceptual. Indeed, accepting for a marketing department that the volume of leads is no longer an objective in itself, but an intermediate indicator in a management focused on the increment of sales and margin, is not in use in the industry today. This is a real difficult change for brand management, but it can be achieved with the implementation of a double run between the management models to demonstrate the relevance of incremental management. This requires structuring the stages of your funnel around large families of KPIs: awareness (brand share of voice, model, volume of SEO impressions, etc.), consideration (visits committed, configurator, financing tool, etc.) and decision (leads, visits, opportunities, orders). Then, for each of these families, to equip themselves to measure, even imperfectly, the increment generated by each major typology of levers (online, offline, relational, offer).
On the tools side, measurement requires complementary approaches. The MMM, as a basis for quantifying the contribution of major channels and simulating budget reallocation scenarios, must be supplemented by multi-touch attribution (MTA) tools, allowing tactical and more granular optimization of digital levers. These have evolved significantly, notably integrating offline events, such as dealership visits, and the ability to follow cohorts from connected TV to the dealership visit. They thus make it possible to feed and enrich the MMM algorithms with more granular data.
The second break is organizational, in terms of the orchestration of the different tools within a data/analytics center to manage the effectiveness of actions with monthly management of MTA tools, biannual management of MMM tools. These measurements must be supplemented and punctuated with incremental tests (variation in media pressure, lever tests, geographical tests, creative tests) thus making it possible to isolate the causal effects of a campaign, a lever or a format, and to refine the management. This measure requires a lot of agility with all stakeholders within the marketing department, to monitor and implement the different actions: creative, digital, media agencies. The purpose of this orchestration within the marketing teams is to build a common measurement base with finance and sales. This involves defining budget simulation processes, unified KPIs to monitor the value created, and setting up joint committees between these three departments to manage effectively.
From volume to value: the real turning point in auto marketing
The effort is real. It requires investing in solid foundations, tools that cover the entire journey, as well as teams and processes that make it possible to manage performance, simulate budget scenarios and monitor results over time.
The challenge is to reconcile the complexity of the pathways with the simplicity of a reliable and actionable performance measurement. As long as marketing remains driven by volume, it can be contested. Driven incrementally, it becomes strategic again — capable of concretely demonstrating its contribution to value creation.
