The Truth About Car Buyers: Why Marketplaces Still Matter with Jennifer Vianello | NADA Show 2025

Either actually.

Cool. Jen, thanks for having us today. We're sitting here at the Cars Commerce booth, and you're probably responsible for a ton of this craziness as CMO, right?

Yes, absolutely. A lot of the things you see here, but really backed by an incredible team. They are pros.

Yeah, so I worked at Cars.com from 2007 to 2010 when it was a startup. I left for 12 years and came back in 2022 in this role.

I worked for Publicis Media, which is the largest media agency network in the Americas.

Well, as a starting point, Cars Commerce—when I joined, we had acquired a number of companies. We didn't have a parent company, a brand architecture, a name to rally the company and our go-to-market around. We spent quite a bit of time debating what the name should be. Commerce as a concept right now is a huge topic: the rise of commerce media networks, commerce retail technologies. Commerce is a really big topic happening in marketing circles and technology circles. It was honestly amazing to me that nobody had grabbed the name Cars Commerce. We are building and have built the first connected commerce company for automotive. It was such a gift to be able to just call ourselves Cars. As a brand marketer myself, I love the icons getting aligned and the colors flowing through. It's a fun brand to watch the evolution of over the last few years. I love how we're showing up here because it's exuberant. That was a career project to work on for this company, particularly since Cars.com was so near and dear to my heart already. I worked here early days, knew what it felt like, and it's grown. But where the boomerang piece gets really important is that in my first tour, I was in charge of advertiser insights. That really meant what are all the things we know about our audience that would be relevant to our advertisers? That was in the mid to late 2000s. I know our audience so well. I have known this audience for so long. I could be in a room with them and tell you who they are. What's interesting is that as much as this industry has been and will continue to be disrupted—it's never a dull moment—there is one thing that remains true: consumers will crush up. They are not brand loyal. They are only in market every five to seven years. They don't know what vehicles are available, don't know what the latest model releases are. They're not tracking like we are every year. They're not immersed in that. Particularly at this moment, where all the OEMs have overhauled their model lineup and EVs are coming out, consumers just don't know. Consumers are re-educating themselves on the entirety of the model lineup. There are so many OEMs that have been depreciating certain model brands. The education need right now is really significant, and that's before you add in EVs. The thing that is so true about this audience, and it was true in 2007 and I'm sure it was true in 1970, is that the consideration set—and this is the only category that is like this—the consumer consideration set expands as they start shopping rather than contracts. They do not narrow down to start. They might have an idea in mind, they research that car, it's not the right one for them, they get turned on to a whole bunch of different other options, and only then do they narrow to a dealer.

Well, I think that it does work to market the specific VIN. We have products—we launched a product last year called VIN Performance Media that does that. But it all comes down to where the consumer is in their stage. It makes no sense to advertise a specific used vehicle VIN to a consumer who's just starting their journey of what car do I want. That's not useful to them at that stage. They first want to know, okay, do I want—what happened with the transition from the Hyundai Santa Fe to the Palisade to the new Santa Fe that's come out? I have a used Santa Fe. So they're going to want to understand that and then what are the competing cars, what's the difference between the Palisade and the Telluride, for example. Getting a VIN-specific ad at that stage is meaningless. Who cares? So it's almost like a double pyramid: it's narrow to wide, then wide to narrow. That is why the marketplaces are so important—they need the depth of research, the depth of inventory, the ability to connect to a dealer. As much as portions of the process have moved online more and more, that will continue. There are absolutely pain points in the process from a consumer standpoint that can be simplified. But most people do not want to just buy a vehicle online. They want to go sit in it. That's particularly true for first-time car buyers. I hear a lot about Gen Z going to fully buy online—no, they're going directly to the retail solution. Actually, Boomers are more likely to buy fully online because they've bought multiple cars before. There's no first-time home buyer who just buys a house site unseen. It's much more like first-time home buyers than an Instagram impulse purchase.

I will say it's humbling to me to be kind of the keeper of the audience. I'm responsible for acquiring them, and my team is responsible for how we expose them to our dealer partners and OEM partners. We have just gone on a pretty lengthy journey to take a look at all of our different ad solutions that we offer on Cars.com as well as some of our audience extension products and make sure they are really tied to outcomes that dealers want. That gets back to your question about VIN-specific advertising—is it relevant? We have an answer to that. We have four products in our dealer media suite. We have a video product for building awareness, ideal for a new dealership opening, a new rooftop, something like that. It can rapidly acquire—if you want to tout your trade-in capabilities, service drive, any of those things—live in a video spot. Broad branding. We can put that in living room video and reach our real in-market car shoppers. That's the important thing: it's a deterministic audience, not modeled. So that's for awareness building. We have display for consideration. We have VIN Performance Media, which I mentioned, a VIN-specific product. We use AI to automate what VIN a consumer sees across search, social, and display, both on Cars.com and off, and the whole thing is automated. Then we have a social media product, Car Social. The VIN-specific VIN Performance Media is designed to accelerate VDP views, and Car Social is designed to drive website traffic for the dealer. We have one for each because it should be simple. You need all of those things, and the performance of the product should be tied to the outcome you're trying to drive. But the brand piece is incredibly important. Performance marketing frankly just works a lot better when you've got a strong brand. Everything works better when you have a strong brand. And we see you execute that on the consumer side as well.

Well, Jen, thanks so much for your time. You've got great energy, and we love that you're caring for dealers and consumers and having to kind of massage all that together.

It is a testament to Alex Vetter that for 26 years, we have done right by both sides of the marketplace consistently.