Broadcast TV Puts Car Dealer In Fast Lane

When it first opened its showroom in 2003, New Port Richey Hyundai, located more than 30 miles northwest of Tampa, Fla., didn’t buy any broadcast advertising.

Scott Fink’s dealership was advertising in the local paper, through direct mail and on cable. That was always the plan.

“I wanted to build a core of customers that I could serve well, and they could pass the word on to others, in a bigger and bigger circle,” he says. “Those customers were my foot soldiers. I knew I wasn’t going to get somebody to drive all day to shop here right away.”

With good deals, good service and a well-thought-out advertising plan, his dealership grew rapidly. The first month he was in business, Hyundai calculated he’d sell 47 new cars. He sold nearly three times that.

But when it was time to expand his base, he needed broadcast TV, and a plan. Adam Armbruster, a TV consultant and partner in Eckstein, Summers, Armbruster & Co., who was working with Tampa’s NBC affiliate WFLA, helped devise a way to take Fink to the next level.

“I think what WLFA told him … was that he had captured his A and B markets and that now they would deliver A through Z,” Armbruster says.

Today, Fink is the largest Hyundai dealer in the Southeast and the third largest Hyundai dealer in the United States — 4,700 new cars sold last year. The dealership sold more Hyundais in December — 450 — than any other Hyundai store.

Fink now advertises on two other Tampa stations, and makes sure he gets his name out there. Fink prefers to buy 15-second bookend commercials, where two spots will play in the same advertising break.

“It gives the perception of frequency,” he explains. “I do my own ads. I like that people say, ‘I see you on TV all the time.’ It means they’re seeing those ads.”

The frequency is more than a perception. Fink buys $500,000-$700,000 in broadcast advertising a year, a budget that increased a little this year.

Elements of Fink’s modus operandi sound familiar, but maybe aren’t. His ads are usually tied to a specific sales event. And he likes to buy in live events — “things that aren’t going to be DVR’d”— like newscasts or sports.

He also cuts fresh commercials once or twice a month and mixes them in with older spots, something a commercial-addled viewer like me wishes was made a law in all 50 states.

It’s all according to a plan. He’s got a plan. But he’s not always sure the TV account executives he’s met care to find out what it is. “Most media people I’ve met don’t listen,” he says. “They don’t know what I want.”

He advises that account executives “get a better idea of the business they’re selling to, conceptually. What motivates them? They have to listen. They have to look at a customer’s strategy, evaluate the strategy or develop it.”

That sounds pretty common sensical to me, I tell him. Isn’t that what account executives who visited him tried to do?

“In many cases,” he answered, “they told me the station has a specific package they can sell me. ‘We’ve got this program in place, you don’t have to buy long term; it’s only a month.’ I don’t care about that. I’m not looking for a short-term plan.”

Account executives that only make value propositions lose him, he says. What he wants from them are new ways to sell cars. “I’m in business to make money.

“I don’t care to maximize profits because I want to keep growing. I want to sell more cars. TV reps think they know how to bullshit me. Well, I’m No. 1. If they can’t say, ‘Let me show you a way to sell more cars,’ I don’t care.”

That sounds a little bit like the way he sizes up car customers. He’s not overly enamored with being known as the price leader in the market, because, he reasons, “price can always be beaten. Customers want service. People wanted to be treated fairly.”

Raised in the projects in Brooklyn, Fink is an accountant by trade, who had a successful career at Ford Motor Co. but wasn’t enjoying the number crunching. He partnered in two other dealerships and a repair business before landing with Hyundai and turning an out-of-the-way location into a shopping imperative.

“I never sold a car in my life,” he says. He prefers to think of himself as a marketer, not a salesman, which probably also shapes the way he thinks about advertising.

Armbruster says Fink “doesn’t cling to old car dealer habits. He’s very open to new ways of doing things.”

Armbruster repeats Fink’s exhortation that reps do a better job understanding what their customers want. “Strange as that may sound, that’s still somewhat revolutionary in this business,” Armbruster says.

“Station reps usually overcomplicate the process for car dealers. They fill them up with jargon of the TV business. Dealers aren’t interested in that.”

Fink began advertising on broadcast TV just as the economy began to tank and kept advertising during the recession, when, he says, some competitors in the market cut back, either because they couldn’t afford to be on the air, or because they thought no one would buy.

“Our sales dropped, but not nearly as much as the industry as a whole,” Fink says. “If they were down 30%, we were down, like 6%. We were lucky to be able to continue to advertise. The first line of marketing is to be the lone message in the marketplace.”

These days, car sales are improving for everybody, but especially Hyundai, putting Fink in a good mood. Coming off that gangbuster December, he says, his January sales were up 70%.

Looks like another good year in the making.

Market Share by P.J. Bednarski, all about TV sales and TV sales people, appears every other week in TVNewsCheck. Bednarski is longtime TV reporter and a former top editor at TV Week and B&C. If you have comments on this column or ideas for future ones, contact him at [email protected]. Read earlier Market Share columns here.