Charlie Bass, Vice President of Sales
Charlie Bass, Vice President of Sales
—
NADA has proven successful for many of the vendors that Canadian auto dealer spoke to this year — one being PureCars, who took the opportunity to launch their new platform Meridian.
“We did a lot of advertising leading up to that. And we’ve talked a little bit more about what Meridian is. And so when the dealers came by, we had a good amount of Canadians and Americans,” said Charlie Bass, Vice President of Sales at PureCars. “Some of the biggest players in Canada came by. More customers came by as well. The main thing that they’re asking is about efficiency — dealers are looking for efficiency.”
Bass said they pride themselves on listening to their dealer clients, and after their continued effort to do this, and extensive research, the company wanted to be more aligned with dealer goals of selling more cars and servicing more vehicles — and doing it profitably. “And really, that’s in a nutshell what Meridian does,” said Bass.
“With Meridian, the other thing we do is we try and cut through the noise. There’s so many vendors out there, so many companies and third parties out there. So what Meridian does is we look at all of that data in one centralized spot. We could see TRADER.ca, we could see the spend, they have your cars or other ad partners, and we can really show them that return on their ad spend,” said Bass.
He also said they can do the same thing with fixed ops; they can deploy ad dollars across search display. Social media too, he noted, has been a big growth opportunity for some dealers, as they can look at “good” data and be able to market to those consumers more effectively. But some dealers, he said, don’t have access to their own data.
“A lot of them say, ‘we trust [the company we are working with] as a partner, but we don’t really know what’s happening behind them,’” said Bass. “That’s something that I’ve mentioned in all my discussions with dealers — about how transparent we are. They may still take ownership of all these digital assets.”
Bass said PureCars simply taps into that data, and that their focus is looking at what the dealer’s return on investment is.
Return to NADA Show 2020
