Reimagining Video Marketing

Brian Pasch0:00Hi, this is Brian Pasch and today we're going to be tackling a really relevant topic because dealers are looking for new ways to increase their brand awareness in their local market, lower their cost per acquisition and attempt new strategies, not fishing in the same pool that everyone else is fishing in. In order to do that, I've asked Owen and Kevin from Dealer Stream to come on today's podcast and talk about the latest Pasch Research Report, which is covering OTT and streaming media. Owen, Kevin, welcome to the show.

Owen Moon0:47Hello, hello. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it.

Kevin Kulma0:50Thanks for having us, Brian. Thanks.

Brian Pasch0:53Hey guys, let's kick off just at a high level because some people don't know about the streaming report. We've spent the last few months researching what's in the marketplace. We've talked to dealers. We've done a national survey. We put all our findings together and dealers can go to paschgroup.com and go to the research section and download the report. It's free. Owen, tell everyone a little bit of how long Dealer Stream has been in business because that sets the context because I see you as more of a disruptive force trying to clean up the industry that lacked transparency for such a long time.

Owen Moon1:38Yeah, 100%. It's funny, sometimes being a legacy company isn't always a good thing. And I think in this case, it kind of holds true. We're almost on to the end of our second year in business. And, you know, we looked at, you know, we used to own a company called Fixed Ops Digital. Part of our strategy there, part of our offerings was a video product. We had dealers asking us how we could get more paid traffic to their content that we were delivering for them on the service side. And so we looked at OTT. We thought video might be a good way to kind of chop up these videos, make them 10, 15 second ads.

Owen Moon2:16And we just started to kind of look at this, you know, holistically and realize that there was just a lot of quicksand. There was a lot of, you know, old, outdated strategies. And so when we had an opportunity in October of 2023 to start Dealer Stream, we really built it with the idea of, like, let's make this more of a, you know, an intelligent type of strategy. Let's focus on, you know, quality and really taking, you know, some of the things that we've learned from the days of linear, right, running on broadcast and with our reach and being able to hit audiences, you know, in high value shows and things like that.

Owen Moon2:55And let's sort of bring that philosophy to the streaming OTT space. And so that's kind of how we kicked off Dealer Stream and kind of been our mission ever since. We did get a little bit lucky, and I'm sure we'll talk a little more about some of the fraud issues and things like that that we've seen along the way. That sort of played right into the, I guess, the mission, something that we didn't realize was as bad of an issue as it was. It just played right into, you know, why Dealer Stream was created and what we're doing every day to help our dealer clients.

Brian Pasch3:30Yeah, and we're going to be talking about that for the dealers and marketing managers who are listening in. I just want to let you know that downloading the research report isn't just a story where the industry is, but there's also questions that you should be asking your OTT and streaming provider and what the bar should be raised to to make sure that your dollars are being spent efficiently. We're going to come back to that. Kevin, I want to talk to you about something. We're talking about a world where dealers believe every click, hover, swipe, conversion can be mapped to a car sale. We know this is a little bit of a fool's errand because of all the different touch points that consumers engage with as they're shopping for a car.

Brian Pasch4:20But you and I were talking earlier that there's one fundamental thing that dealers maybe have gotten away from, and this is the power of the brand promise, the why behind doing business. Video has always traditionally been a media for local, top of mind awareness. It looks like with Google and Meta and TikTok and LinkedIn and, well, other facets, we've been overly obsessed with the last mile click attribution or that last mile ad. Why do dealers have to, in a sense, bring back a little of the strategy that they used to have about distinguishing your brand to local shoppers?

Kevin Kulma5:10Yeah, absolutely, Brian. One thing that we say at Dealer Stream all the time is connected TV has the visual medium of television that's storytelling, but it has the digital targeting capabilities of paid search and paid social. No longer does a dealer have to just only rely on end of the month, two-week run cycles, price payment ad, because they're only buying linear TV in multiple zones, right? With us and with Dealer Stream, you have the ability to actually go ahead and tell different stories in that medium. So, like, for example, you can have a sales campaign, but also a service campaign with different targeting parameters, right?

Kevin Kulma5:56From service, we know that most of your service repair orders come from an eight-mile radius and within. We can actually target that way. And really, when you start talking about the ability to mix in different messaging, whether it be vehicle acquisition or, we were talking, Subaru does a great job with their love promise. The dealership or the franchise dealership provides so much to its local economy in terms of employment and tax revenue and charitable contributions that those are the stories you want to actually tell. Let, for example, Google VLAs and your website do the conversion mechanism. You can actually brand yourself and tell your story all while actually getting a lot of those marketing messaging across.

Kevin Kulma6:48And that's what Dealer Stream does in terms of allowing our dealers to not only just think about the price payment ad, like it's a big component of it, but we also want them to think outside the box and how they can actually handle some of their other profit centers or just their overall messaging in general.

Brian Pasch7:07You know, I want to just lean in for a moment and speak to the dealers and marketing managers because I'm going to be transparent. I haven't really spent a lot of time in building OTT, CTV campaigns on a regular basis. I've been involved in conversations. But from what I remember is dealers would come in and say, OK, I want to reach my market. OK, you want to spend five grand or 10 grand or 15 grand and we'll do a streaming campaign. What I learned from the dealers that we interviewed is that they've really taken the Dealer Stream technology to another whole level in in a way that they're targeting like an SEM campaign in Google ads.

Brian Pasch8:03They're taking a thousand dollar budget and say, let me hit the Hispanic community. Let me take another fifteen hundred and do a lapsed service campaign. Let me take these, you know, folks who have purchased from us before. And and I'm like, well, how many campaigns are you running? Oh, we're running five or six or seven. And I'm like, well, what are you spending like 40, 50 thousand? They're like, no, boom, boom. And I want to make sure dealers understand that spray and pray isn't the strategy to win, even with branding, especially if you have some geo restrictions to help people get to your dealership. If you're sitting on tons of data in your DMS, if you're a brand new point.

Owen Moon8:52Yeah.

Brian Pasch8:52OK, you don't have as much targeting or service records, but I'd like to have one of you just talk about this this trend of having measurable, granular streaming campaigns. And it's not just one big brush. Let's send one or two messages out this month.

Owen Moon9:14Yeah, I'll definitely touch on that. And I also think it comes down to also your demographics.

Brian Pasch9:19Right.

Owen Moon9:20I think there's a lot I hear all the time dealers go, hey, that sounds like a really great product. But I'm over here in the middle of North Dakota. How is that going to affect me? Where maybe a dealer in the suburbs of Chicago actually could use that product a little bit better. The thing we've noticed in running campaigns with all of our dealers and we have dealers of all different sizes and geographic areas and things like that is that our rural campaigns actually perform in some cases better than our metro campaigns or just as well as our metro campaigns. So it's not limited by your local market or who you know, how big your market is and that kind of thing.

Owen Moon10:00What what we've also found is that when you look at all your profit centers and this was something that we were big in, you know, when we were really focused on service for years is that they had body shops and they had parts and they had, you know, regular service centers and things like that. You know, we want to touch all those things. And so now that, you know, streaming has obviously been the focus here over the last couple of years, we've said the same thing like, hey, let's look at vehicle acquisition. Let's focus on, you know, service. Let's focus on mobile service. We had a case study come out late last year into early this year with a group down south that did a mobile service campaign with us for over for the whole year.

Owen Moon10:41And we looked at our results from the beginning of the year to the end of the year and yeah, there was a lot of great lift in terms of utilization metrics and where they like ranked. But one of the things they gave us credit for was one out of every 12 mobile service appointments resulted in either a vehicle purchase or a vehicle trade. And that was something that was sort of like they didn't expect it. We didn't expect it. It was sort of one of those things that happened as an ancillary benefit to running a mobile service campaign. So there's a lot of benefits to talking about other things other than, oh, this month, Silverado's got a $10,000 off rebate as Kevin was alluding to.

Brian Pasch11:20So I love it. I love it. One of the uglier sides of this marketing segment is the lack of transparency. And I'm going to say a few things because I want people listening into the podcast, I'm going to challenge you to go back and look at your reports that you're getting from your current streaming media buying service, however you're buying it. That it seems to me that there's the reseller of the reseller of the reseller of the reseller problem, which means that what the dealer really wanted may not be communicated all the way into execution. Number one problem. Number two, people selling on CPM, which is just a cost metric.

Brian Pasch12:15And to get low CPMs, they were blending in things that are not considered the dealers who we surveyed said banner advertising to lower the CPM is not what I was buying yet. It was being blended in. And then the third thing, which I thought I was surprised in 2026, that wasn't a default, was dealers saw that some of the vendors were blowing through their budget in the first two weeks. There was no pacing. So the real nutshell here for the dealers is who are you really buying it from? What are you really buying and how do you know that it was run consistently through the month so that the reach, frequency, and objectives of your sales campaigns could be fully realized?

Brian Pasch13:21But three out of four dealers that we spoke to said they're not getting that. How is Dealer Stream able to do these things when other people in the market and even relatively well-known agency brands can't?

Kevin Kulma13:41Yeah. So I think we talked about this. Probably the most prevalent phrase in connected TV or OTT is we follow the audience, right? So one of the interesting things was when we first started kind of looking at this and looking at this space, it's like, I just wanted to actually target or have reporting that matched the way my family streamed. I have two children. I have a wife. My kids are 8 and 12. They come home from school. We're sitting in the living room on our big screen TV, and we might have Disney+ on or a Netflix. And then in the evening, kids go to bed.

Kevin Kulma14:24My wife and I might have a glass of wine, kind of, and then chill out and actually watch Paramount+ or HBO Max in the evenings. Well, every report that we actually were given by our dealer partners was always mixed in with all that lower tier inventory. And I kept asking the question, if you're following the audience, why isn't the majority of your impressions actually on the publishers and the channels that people are actually watching? What is this Philo TV? What is a cheddar.com? What is cheeseburger.com in terms of OLV have to do with me wanting to actually run in a living room of Netflix or Paramount+?

Kevin Kulma15:14And every person that we spoke to is like, oh, we follow the audience. We follow the audience. We're following in-market shoppers. That's where we're finding them all. That is factually incorrect. They're not following the audience. They're placing you on the programming and the channels that they want to put you on to maximize the profit because here's the reason why. Most people don't realize that there's different cost structures when you're buying Philo TV at 2 in the morning to Paramount+, which is their highest deal ID of inventory at 8 p.m. There's a wild cost structure there. So what happens is if a dealer thinks like, oh, you know what?

Kevin Kulma16:01I'm doing really great. I'm driving down the CPM because I negotiated from 24 to 20. It's actually harming them, not helping them because the vendor then just goes, okay, you know what? Instead of me putting you on better inventory that's actually above that cost structure, I'm just going to put you on more cheap inventory. And then when they go to look at the report and see all those essentially lower tier inventory channels, they all of a sudden realize like, oh, guess what? That lower CPM doesn't do me any good. And pro tip, Owen's going to talk about this. Oh, sorry. I know what he's smiling.

Kevin Kulma16:44I know exactly what he's going to say.

Brian Pasch16:46Yeah. I just want to make a point. When people talk about all these other channels, I'm just telling you my life, without the kids, at night, we have, okay, we're going to watch an epi. That's what we say, epi. We're going to do one epi tonight or two epi. Not epi pens, but episodes. And so Carrie's like, are we one or two epis? And I'm always normally one epi shut off TV. And I get yelled at a lot. But we are on Paramount+. You know, last night we were, you know, on Paramount+. We're on Amazon Prime and we're on Netflix. I would say 90%. I'm not on like Fubo.

Brian Pasch17:33I'm not on all these other, you know, like free, I'm like, I don't know. Like I have no use for that. And I guess if people don't want to pay a subscription, they're trying to do some things. But, I mean, every one of my friends, and they're talking about the shows on Netflix, Amazon, Paramount+, and, you know, I don't know what to say. And Apple TV. So, if a dealer isn't hitting these mediums, what are they really buying, Owen?

Owen Moon18:11Well, and I think that's the interesting part, right? That you can show a lot of really good stuff on a very basic report. We know that 84% of all streaming activity to your, you've named off all the, you know, three of the popular ones. 84% are on 10 apps, 10 publishers. So, that's really where the action is. And it's no different than we bought, you know, linear back in the day. Why were we buying 6 p.m. News, 10 p.m. News, all the prime spots? Why were we buying Letterman and Jay Leno? It's because that's where the data said was all the audience. So, it's no different than what we're trying to accomplish here.

Owen Moon18:51I think what ends up happening is, I would say automotive may be a little bit worse than maybe most industries. But I think in a lot of cases, you kind of get what you ask for. When the advertiser says, man, you're just too expensive, what's a vendor to do? Vendors to be like, hey, I can get that cheaper. Doesn't mean it's going to be the exact same product we'll set or the same strategy. But I can get it cheaper for you so that Mr. or Mrs. dealer feels really good about the dollar he is spending. To Kevin's point, that's where the quicksand happens, right? All of a sudden, you get a watered-down campaign.

Owen Moon19:24It's filled with, you know, these fast channels, these free advertising channels. But I even think it's even a step further. And it's something that I've really started to dig into over the last six, eight months here. Even some of your legacy providers are starting to put their streaming campaigns on their own properties more and more. Because think about it. It's 100% markup. They can put them on a news or a sports channel or some sort of a free advertising channel.

Brian Pasch19:55So, I want to be clear, because I'm not sure every dealer understand what you're saying. But if I am the Spectrum Reach app or the Xfinity app, right? If people are pushing advertising on their own app, you're saying, look, it's 100% profit. I'm not sharing the fee with another publisher.

Owen Moon20:22Yeah. And I think that those have some value at a certain percentage, right? I mean, you can run some of those ads on those. But then when you're missing some of those top 10 that, to your point, you know, I made a comment. We were talking Landman because one of the guys that I was talking with last week at a conference we're at is from West Texas. And he's like, man, I'm all about Landman. Let's go, you know. The first episode of the first year was 3 million viewers. The first episode of the second year, 35 million viewers. So, you think about the growth that just happened in one year of a popular show like that.

Owen Moon20:56These publishers understand that. So, they're coming out with all their own quality content and shows that they can run on their own app to kind of keep people captivated, right?

Brian Pasch21:06Yes.

Owen Moon21:06That's where we want our audience. That's where we want to put our advertisers. You know, I've been doing advertising for 26 years, and it's always been the same. Follow the audience in a good way. If you follow the audience and where they're actually running and where they're actually watching, that's where, as car dealers, we want to put our ads. And that's what we're trying to accomplish every day.

Kevin Kulma21:27Well, hey, Brian. And one thing that Owen mentioned is quicksand. And you referenced, for example, a couple, like, legacy providers or the big one now today is the Amazon seller and or, like, Amazon utilization. What happens is not all inventory is created equally. So, when you hear, oh, I'm on Amazon, Amazon has different brackets and tiers of inventory that is vastly, vastly different, meaning Amazon gives you show-level data. So, we can actually show our dealers where exactly in the actual environment they're actually on. So, for Prime Video, there's a big difference between Reacher, which is their number one stream program right now in the Prime Video ecosystem,

Kevin Kulma22:26versus, let's call it their free version or freebie, or it's kind of like a designation in there, where they're putting you on FuboTV installed inside of Prime Video. And once again, that's where the dealers have to just ask a secondary or a tertiary question where it's, all right, I know you're telling me I'm on Prime Video, but what does that actually mean? Because an answer typically is like, oh, yeah, we follow the audience. It's through the Amazon DSP. And then when you look one layer or two layers deeper, you quickly find out that they're not actually at 7 p.m. on Reacher, which that would be an epi that you and the missus might be watching.

Kevin Kulma23:19And we love the Reacher. It is a really good show. But all of a sudden, it's kind of the same scenario, and we talk about this all the time, is the same pitfalls that a dealer had to actually learn about when buying Google Ads 10 or 15 years ago. Those same pitfalls are happening today, lack of transparency, not telling you what budget is ran on, like, for example, what's your ad spend versus what your management fee is. Because once again, there is a huge delta between Google Display and Google Paid Search, not only in quality, but also in actually price.

Brian Pasch24:07And you know what, I have a story, I'll anonymize it, but there was a relatively large company in our automotive industry back in the day when Google was actually giving performance bonuses to agencies and website companies to sell Google, right? They got everyone on the drug, and then they took away the bonus structure. But the way you hit your bonus structure was quarter over quarter, you had to be increasing the dealer's spend. And I remember once, got a promotion, it's like, hey, buy, you know, display, and we'll give you two months for the price of one. And I'm like, wow, I've never heard that before.

Brian Pasch24:49Here's the reason why. The markup on display is crazy, right? So display typically doesn't even convert. It's more of a weird, you know, retargeting or whatever. But they just hope that you turn it on so you never cancel it, right? You forget to cancel it. And so as we try to land this ship in today's world, I have some questions for my automotive colleagues, the people working in dealerships, the marketing managers. For the most part, as I talk to the members of our CXO group, and a number of them are using Dealer Stream, I think they've been a little burnt out. And if you're burned out, it's like, man, I tried Stream, I tried OTT, just crap, and I had nobody telling me they saw our ads.

Brian Pasch25:47And by the way, I just want to talk about this. Every person that we interviewed who was using Dealer Stream said, before with my other vendors, we never saw our ads. No one talked about them. When we moved to Dealer Stream, people talked about them. And one very funny example, and it's all in the research report, but this one dealer group, most of the ads were always done by the owners. The marketing department got creative and decided to use, let's just say, a local celebrity to promote. And it went out, her phone started ringing, like, who authorized these ads? Okay, but the thing was, is everyone saw them.

Brian Pasch26:31I'm surprised that dealers don't know that their ads only ran half of the month and ran on a budget. I'm really surprised that dealers don't know that a chunk of their spend went to display. I'm surprised that they really don't look into, or maybe not providing, which channels, which programming their ads were shown on. The dice, to me, seems to be against the dealer. It's a reseller of a reseller of a reseller with no control. The house, I believe in the past, has been stacked against the dealer. Now, there's something new. More accountability, more precision targeting, more details in how the spend was. And, Kevin, I love your example.

Brian Pasch27:24At the beginning with Google, just spend money. It's just throw it out there. Get on Google, right? That's what dealers call me up. I just need to be on Google. And I think that's what happened. I need to be on streaming. I got to reach the cord cutters. We're now moving past the gluttonous spray and pray approach, and we're moving into a time where dealers can run Google ads type, targeting strategies, multiple campaigns a month, with transparency, with accountability. One of the other things, Owen, I think you brought it up. And you were mentioning it's not a bad thing, but it's something to be aware of.

Brian Pasch28:04The idea that part of the spend may be on streaming audio. Can we talk about that, that in addition to like just streaming with the video ad, what about audio advertising?

Owen Moon28:22Yeah, audio is great because obviously it's a whole different area, kind of the same idea, but a different area to want to reach consumers. So when you look at, you know, I kind of mentioned that, you know, when we ran linear television, a lot of times it was, you know, 6 p.m. to midnight or 6 p.m. to 11, because that's where a lot of the viewership was, and that's where all the audience was. Streaming audio is actually very heavy from 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon. No different than, you know, when we used to run a lot of radio, and it was you had your drive times and different things like that, where you're trying to reach consumers when they're in their cars.

Owen Moon29:01So when you complement an audio campaign with a streaming television, or in our case, a connected TV campaign, you sort of reach consumers all day long, right? Which is great because as they're listening to podcasts, which is, by the way, blowing up and becoming very popular, it's already there. I mean, it's not like it's new. Joe Rogan pretty much put it on the map years ago that, you know, everybody's now got a podcast or something that they're, and not just automotive. I'm talking, you know, national ones and things like that.

Brian Pasch29:27Right.

Owen Moon29:28So you have podcasts, you have music, you've got, you know, the Alexas and the Siris of the world, you've got connected vehicles. There's a lot of ways to use audio now to really reach consumers during those 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. days, or time frames of the day, and then come home, and now all of a sudden you're catching them watching some of their favorite programming on some of these apps. So it's not very expensive, Kevin could talk a little bit about some of the strategies there, maybe, but we definitely use that as a compliment to a lot of the things that we're doing on the streaming television side.

Brian Pasch30:01Great. Gentlemen, I want to close on a positive note. The research report is the first comprehensive research report in automotive retail for connected TV, OTT streaming media, backed by dealer surveys, backed by dealer interviews, which are all included in the report. I want to encourage you to go to paschgroup.com and download it, have a conversation with your marketing team. And especially in today's market, I'm just going to lay it out there. It's challenging out there. There are more cars on dealers lots than anybody want to see floor planning costs. Kevin, a dealer who's saying, look, I've been doing my Google, and I've been doing my Meta advertising.

Brian Pasch30:53Hey, I'm even on TikTok, you know, and I'm trying to be relevant. I'm on the marketplace websites, cars.com, Trader, CarGurus, but I'm not turning cars fast enough. And they're like, yeah, but I got burned on that streaming OTT before. What's a positive word you could give dealers listening and marketing managers who are being told, I need to move more cars. How would you describe today's approach and what even a budget range could be to help dealers increase showroom traffic?

Kevin Kulma31:33Yeah, great question. Really, like, when you talk about, like, strategy, it's what are your challenges today? Because each dealership is unique into itself, right? One Kia dealership on the, let's say, Gulf side of Florida versus the Atlantic side of Florida are going to face different challenges. Realistically, what we do is we put together market analysis. We look at, like, for example, demographics of your zip codes, composition of age, vehicles in operation through S&P Global. And we really start to look at, for example, those zip codes on where you're trying to actually sell. Because once again, it's not a PMA buy anymore. A PMA buy is a bad thing for a dealer.

Kevin Kulma32:23It's too broad. You're essentially, like, you're essentially getting too far out there. Because logistically, every dealer sells X percentage of vehicles in certain, like, for example, zip codes, pockets. And that fluctuation happens each and every month. So the first start is the conversation, the market analysis. And then you start building into the strategy. We often talk about, like, connected television in three legs of a stool, right? The first is obviously, like, the targeting. Whether it be, like, the publisher and ultimately, like, where we're placing it. Connected TV versus mobile, right? We do the majority of our actual buys on connected TV. It turns out to be, like, 91%, 92%.

Kevin Kulma33:12Then you talk about, like, audience, zip code, et cetera, et cetera. But the last one is the creative. And the creative is the one that more often than not, the dealers get tripped up on. Because they say, okay, I actually have an issue with using that Kia example. I'm looking to push a Spanish campaign. But then their agency only does a $199 K5 video because that's the cheapest one that they have on their lot. Well, those things don't go hand in hand. So we want to have those three legs of a stool that make a great streaming campaign. And creative is the big differentiator. And the one thing I can say about creative, and this is something that comes up all the time, is authentic, well-done creative wins.

Kevin Kulma34:11If you have these Google Voice, AI slop is the new kind of, like, term that's out there.

Brian Pasch34:18That's right.

Kevin Kulma34:18Where you're literally not conveying your brand messaging values and, more specifically, the messaging that you want to get to the consumer, no targeting is ever going to work correctly. And that's one of the biggest pitfalls, because here's the reason why. When you're watching an epi, like you actually talked about, do you ever see this, we're blowing out cars, we're this price payment, we're this, we're that, come in now, we'll get you actually financed. You never see those on Prime Video, watching Reacher at 8 p.m. It's all professionally done videos by Fortune 5000 companies. Those videos will get restricted. They will not actually run. That's why you find We Follow the Audience doesn't necessarily follow the audience.

Kevin Kulma35:19It follows you to FuboTV or Philo TV or whatnot.

Brian Pasch35:24Right, where their brand standards are so much lower. You know, and this is so important. Again, I want to encourage you to download the research report, because it's, I think, about 40 pages, and it is rich with strategy, checklist, questions to ask your agency. Owen, I'm going to give you the final word. We've talked about a new era of transparency, accountability, targeting, and measurement, and that dealers who need to move the needle can have your strategy team look at their market, give them a particular plan. What else did we miss? What's the final word you want to leave with the marketing managers and general managers who are leaning in on today's podcast?

Owen Moon36:15Yeah, you know, it's been a great discussion. So, first of all, thanks for having us on, and thanks for all your work on this. I know that we had a dealer tell us at NADA that until their team or their general managers, owners tell them to put a better effort out there for streaming OTT, it sort of gets pushed to the back burner. Well, the one thing I've always said was, follow the sports organizations. Look at UFC. They dismantled a billion-dollar pay-per-view business model to sign with Paramount+. You know, try finding the NFL during the holidays has become a game. Like, one game's on Peacock, another game's on Hulu, another game's on Netflix.

Owen Moon36:59You know, that's not a fluke. That is the new norm, and as more and more consumers are moving that direction, that number, we actually, streaming surpassed both cable and broadcast in viewership. I think it was June of last year, and it just continues to start to, that spread is getting bigger. That's the new opportunity. And, you know, with an average attention span of eight seconds of an adult, to have 30 seconds of undivided attention to get your message across, I think, is gold. But it's got to be done right, because, again, there's a lot of quicksand, and there's just a lot of old strategies that are still sort of infiltrating this space today.

Owen Moon37:43And so, if you don't do business with us, at least let us tell you what you should be asking your current provider. It's amazing what they end up finding out when they start asking the right questions. And so, I think that this is going to continue to grow. I think more and more people are going to look at this strategy as a part of their mid-funnel approach, because we've kind of lost that. Everything we talk about is low-funnel, last-click attribution, and the middle funnel is sort of dying out. And that's why our CRMs are not working as well. It's why we're losing customers. It's why we're not, you know, losing that retention.

Owen Moon38:21And I think bringing this back into the mix at some level, it doesn't have to be a huge level. We don't have dealers, you know, spending 80% of their money with us. But give us an opportunity to work for you, and I think you'll find that you're getting those results that our dealers are getting every day. So, that's the challenge I'd leave to dealers is just re-look at it, but make sure you come in with the knowledge of what you're looking for and what you need to ask. And I think you'll see that this strategy will be something that will grow as you kind of finish this year and move into 27 and beyond.

Owen Moon38:57And your research paper is a great start, because it gives dealers a lot of the information that we talked about today and expands on it even more.

Brian Pasch39:07Great. Okay. Well, I want to thank everyone for listening in. I'm sure you have some questions. You can go to dealerstream.com and just put in a request to have someone from the team contact you. I want to also remind you, go to paschgroup.com, click on the research reports, and you'll see the OTT streaming report is there for you to grab a free copy. I want to thank everyone who have been faithful to listening to this podcast channel, and there's dozens of interviews of great companies as we get ready for the Modern Retailing Conference coming up in November at the beautiful Eau Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Brian Pasch39:53If you want a conference that's going to prepare you for the future, we're going to be talking about those critical things that are changing at a rapid pace in automotive retail at the modernretailingconference.com. You can get your tickets, book your room. It sells that every year, so don't miss out on the great conversations. The team at Dealer Stream will be doing a workshop there, and it's just a great place to network with some of the smartest people in automotive retail. Owen and Kevin, thanks for your time today. Thanks you for listening in and watching, and we'll catch you next time on another Pasch podcast.