What’s Next for Car Buying? Insights from Cars.com CMO Jennifer Vianello

It's been a great day. I got to share some new marketing work with the whole company right before this, which was really a treat.

Yep.

I am in the office, but we did it virtually.

Yes, although we've always had a really large remote workforce because we have salespeople all across the company, so we've been in a good position to handle that transition.

Of course. I am a boomerang, and I'm about 10 months into this stint, which has been just an incredible ride. I was at Cars.com from 2007 to 2010, and I was hired to work with our national sales team, which is the team that sells advertising to the automakers. They said, 'We've got this pile of audience data and we need somebody who can do data-driven storytelling.' That was early days of the internet and audience selling to begin with. They just sat me down and said, 'Dig through this, help us tell stories with our data to advance our advertising conversations with the OEMs.' It was such a fascinating time to get to pilot that; it was really ahead of its time. That role turned into a combination of sales development, product marketing, client development work, and audience analytics work that was so formative in my career. It led to a real passion area around how we can think about the entire customer journey digitally and how we can think about data not just as the exhaust of how consumers interact with websites or advertising, but also use that data to learn more about how consumers are interacting. I left in 2010 in that first go-round and went to Publicis Group afterwards for about 11 plus years and did a variety of different types of jobs there, but always had an opportunity to dabble in that space of the intersection of audience insights as well as digital data and how all of that comes together and can help media drive business outcomes.

Cars.com is one of the original dot-coms. We are hitting our 25th anniversary, which is quite a milestone and a treat for me to be back here for such a milestone. We are a pioneer in digitizing the automotive shopping, buying, and selling experience. That is what we have been doing for the last 25 years: creating more transparency in that marketplace, sitting at that intersection between car buyers and car retailers. More recently, we have been moving pretty aggressively into simplifying all of the additional facets of shopping for a car, such as financing, trade-in, etc., and really unifying that back-end experience in the modern retail environment in a way that simplifies things for consumers but also enables automotive retailers to be at the top of their game and simplify their operation.

We take inventory predominantly from car dealers themselves; that's our primary customer base. But we absolutely work with the OEMs as well. We partner with them when it comes to their new vehicle inventory, their certified pre-owned inventory, and a number of other ways. And of course, they advertise with us as well.

It's a great question that I am in some ways hesitant to answer because in 25 years there have been so many different predictions. What I can say for sure is that Cars.com has been nimble through so much of it, whether it was the dot-com bust, whether it was the auto bailouts, we have been here in a very dynamic environment, and of course the pandemic. In terms of disruption in the industry, it is an interesting time. There are a number of players that are toying with direct-to-consumer models, and we enable consumers to connect with a seller of vehicles in any way that they choose. But we do see that the vast majority of consumers continue to prefer to purchase in person. It is such a considered purchase, it is such an infrequent purchase, there's so much education and decision-making that happens. 90% of our consumers are undecided on where they're going to purchase a car, and 70% are undecided on make and model. My one prediction that I feel really confident about is that in this category, once a consumer decides that they need to purchase a car, which is often tied to very personal reasons, their consideration set expands as they go through the purchase process. It's one of the very few categories where that's true. Consumers might think there's a specific make and model that they want when they start, but as they start to research and get further into what is available, they start looking at more and more different makes and models that they wouldn't have considered otherwise. That is going to continue to be true because it's the second largest purchase that consumers ever make. That behavior has held true for the past 25 years, and that consideration phase, which is very much where Cars.com sits in the process, is expansive and requires a lot of education and inspiration.

One of the things that's really interesting about my job is that we have a number of different customers. The consumer, we sit primarily between car buyers and car sellers. We design for consumer first; investing in our audience is an investment in our customers. But we monetize primarily through car dealers who use our services to power their stores and to connect with our audience and showcase their available inventory. Marketing of course sits across all of those audiences. OEMs are an incredibly important audience for us as well. But we are a technology company, and much like any technology company, we have an incredibly robust product and technology team. Marketing sits with product and technology to make sure that we are thinking about that holistic experience and how we communicate that experience to all of our audiences.

Absolutely. For example, we recently launched on our site a number of different tools around financing and trade-in. Much like we have an open marketplace for vehicle inventory, which is core to our heritage, we also are increasingly creating an open marketplace for financing and an open marketplace for selling your vehicle, whether it's to a dealer through trade-in or through direct-to-consumer exchange. Those are some of the ways that we think about powering a marketplace that simplifies that car buying experience across all of the different ways that it occurs, which also includes financing and trade-in in addition to inventory selection, and how that connection streamlines the interaction between the consumer and our customers, the dealers.

We have a number of different capabilities in place for doing that type of monitoring. Obviously, we have a ton of data on consumer interaction, and so we're constantly looking at that information and making sure that we are looking at what I would call the health of our marketplaces and ensuring that consumer flow is seamless. But of course, we also have a research team that is doing more survey-based and focus group research to understand what types of untapped opportunities might exist for our products as well.

Our consumer-facing product is our Cars.com website, and nothing is more important in my world than the health of that marketing and how the health of that audience that we're bringing into the site drives value for our paying customers. We look at those metrics on a primarily weekly basis. Anything that you would expect with a website: unique visitors, visits, leads to our customers, new visit return rate, engagement with the site. Those are all things that I personally look at on a weekly basis to make sure that we are pulling as many levers as we possibly can to have this audience. We are talking to nearly 30 million consumers on a monthly basis. I would be remiss not to mention the app as well: app downloads, monthly active users. From a top-line standpoint, we're always looking at that. We also look at the value that we deliver to our customers, which is primarily in the form of consumer engagements with dealers. Is that interaction value distributed appropriately, and are we giving all of our paying customers what they expect in terms of their ability to connect with our audience and sell their vehicles?

We actually have the largest database of dealer ratings and reviews that exists. We are able to see pretty frequently how happy consumers are with their purchase and what their retail experience was. We empower our dealer customers with that information so that they can have the best possible retail experience on their side. We have a reputation, or an experience report, that we provide to dealers so that they can understand what consumers are saying about them. We are actively monitoring as well with surveys: consumer satisfaction with our services as well as dealer satisfaction with our services.

Actually, no, not necessarily. We are not necessarily seeing a change in the reasons why somebody would need personal transportation. During the pandemic, the relationship that consumers had with their vehicles became even more important because they lost access to public transportation and ride sharing. Personal transportation took on much greater importance during that period. People love their cars and love their cars even more now. What is always true is that there's always a next generation of car buyers. It's not so much that we are seeing a change in the reason why people would need personal transportation, but rather that the ways that they are getting information about the car buying process is shifting with the younger generation. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube have taken on an outsized priority within our marketing mix because that's where younger generations are getting their information.

It is a continuing journey and will probably be for a long time. Social media is a constantly evolving space, and TikTok is interesting as a completely different type of model for how consumers are engaging with social media. One of the things that we are testing somewhat aggressively over the last six to nine months is working with influencer networks. We have an incredible asset in our editorial content. We have a number of automotive journalists on staff; they are constantly reviewing vehicles and are a real source of confidence, inspiration, and education for our consumers. Where social has a real opportunity for us is in the syndication of that content across multiple channels. One of the things that we're exploring is how do we adapt our content for this proliferation of channels, for example, vertical videos on TikTok and Instagram. Social also comes in in terms of influencer marketing. We have all of this wealth of expertise, but sometimes there are different voices that we need to bring in to talk about our expertise on our behalf. One of the more interesting things that's happened in the last couple of years is the rise of influencer networks and the automation of some of that work because there are so many people out there who have followings. Now there is a layer of different types of media providers that can allow you to tap into a number of influencers all at the same time with a common campaign.

We've tested a few of them. There are a number of them that exist right now, but one of the ones that we're working with this summer is Influential.

To be honest, I don't want to give them any free press on here.

No, it was good. You know, look at me now, I'm doing my own thing. But anyway, no.

When you were working with influencer networks, that was really ahead of your time, too early. I'm surprised to hear you say yours was like 2013. I think that space is still evolving. Content creators are absolutely talking about, and rightfully so, the value of what they're producing and wanting to make sure that they're fairly compensated. I do see that as a real benefit of some of the networks: it is hard to scale as an advertiser or marketer all of the potential voices, especially in automotive. There are so many people who talk about cars and have a real passion for it, and that can be hard to scale if you're going direct to every single person who might be talking about automotive and might have an audience that is north of a couple of thousand people. That is one of the benefits of the influencer networks and why we're testing them: just the scalability of it and their ability to provide that interface and equitable compensation to the influencers.

Perhaps this is because I spent a number of years in agencies, but agencies do provide really important outside perspective. I think it can be really easy as a client to get mired in your own complexity, and it is important to have expertise that is adjacent to you that provides that type of outside perspective and helps you stay fresh. We have the benefit of being a technology company and a media company, so in many ways we do have that expertise in-house and are pioneering in any number of ways because it is our lifeblood and a necessity. But that doesn't change the need for occasionally pulling in an outside perspective and making sure that we are staying at the forefront. My role is in a very interesting company where it's a really dynamic industry, a really unique industry in terms of how consumers interact. Automotive is just interesting in terms of the tiered model from OEMs to dealers. In addition to that, my role also oversees our media network as well as our marketing services team. In terms of your question about delegation, if I didn't have a good team that I trusted, it would be absolutely impossible. I'm a mom, and when I was having kids, I had a number of more senior female leaders who were also working moms. What they all said to me is something that's absolutely true: being a mother makes you better at work because you have to focus on what's important, you have to let go sometimes, and you have to delegate. There is no better training ground than being a mother and a working mother for something like that.

Three and seven.

Similar ages. They do keep you on your toes.

I have an embarrassing version of that story for myself where I was not nearly as graceful as you, and I'm not going to tell your podcast listeners about it. But I admire you being a face of calm in that situation.

I hope so.

Sure.

I get up at about six, get ready as best as I possibly can. The kids are not allowed to leave their rooms until 6:30, and then they have to get ready really fast. It's always this scramble and the argument of 'please get ready, please go to the bathroom, please wash your hands.' Get them ready downstairs, eat, make lunches, get them out the door by 7:30. At that point, we have a hybrid work environment, so I'm at the office today, sometimes I'm working from home. I'm usually getting started whether it's on my commute or immediately after that. That's the morning, always a scramble to 7:30.

I don't know if that's a question for me as much as people who have worked with me. I would say I have high expectations and high accessibility. I am always talking to people on my teams, I'm always available to them. If there's something they want me to take a look at, I'm always responsive to that. I do have high expectations in general in my life, but I also allow people the access that they need in order to meet them.

It depends on whether I'm with my kids or not. Different answers depending on if I'm traveling with my husband. I am a city person and a city explorer, so I love to go to other countries and explore the culture, explore the food. The choice of where I would go on vacation, and granted these are all vacations that predate having kids for the most part, are in the spirit of where am I going to eat well and where am I going to experience something that I wouldn't get at home. I have the benefit of living in Chicago where there are a lot of really great cultural experiences, so I'll try to go someplace different. With the kids, it is: is there childcare and is there a body of water? Those are the criteria in that case.

I love them all. Amal Clooney. I would love to meet her. She has such a fascinating story and an amazing closet. I really admire her for a number of different reasons that have actually nothing to do with her Hollywood marriage. I actually saw that she also buys Sarah Flint shoes. If any working woman wants to look good in heels, Sarah Flint is a good option.

You can be anything you want to be, but you can't be everything you want to be all at the same time.

I would love that. Thank you so much for having me.