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A digital retail perspective.

Doug Miller has helped some significant brands make big digital transitions. Ever heard of Ticketmaster? Doug was there when they sold their first ticket online. What about Expedia? They started by faxing orders to hotels. So when it comes to the automotive industry, an industry that Doug started in, he’s confident about the digital/physical hybrid future. He’s the President and Chief Commercial Officer of CARS.com, and we are grateful to be able to spend time with him on Auto Collabs.

What we talk about in this episode:
0:00 Intro with Michael Cirillo, Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier.

4:29 Doug was part of the team that originally helped launch CARS.com in 1997. Somehow, the official history starts in 1998, but Doug was there with Alex Vetter when it all began.

11:20 CARS.com has done the legwork of building a marketing platform that puts advertisers in front of customers looking to buy vehicles. Plus, they’ve analyzed the flow and experience of a dealership and built digital tools that can be tailored to individual dealers. Doug is somewhat baffled why more dealers don’t learn from how CARS has operated or take advantage of their tools.

16:41 Doug values connection over credit. He says we spend too much time worrying about attribution and not enough time making all of the tools work together, for both the dealers’ and consumers’ benefit.

21:35 Expedia started by taking orders and then faxing them to the hotel. Ticketmaster used to be 100% in person at a box office. Both of them connected into the digital space over time. Doug thinks that the automotive industry is going to work a little differently.

“I think that the digital transformation of automotive is still going on. But for all the right reasons, right?. The the dealership experience for the consumer matched together with digital is the future is that hybrid of being able to do things digitally, then move locally and actually physically be with this car, get the service that you want on that car, test drive that car, have that relationship with your local dealer, but also then be able to move seamlessly back digital that that's the platform that CARS is investing in to help dealers to get to and and and that it's also I think why Automotive is going to take a little longer because it is by definition more hybrid.”

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