Reach Automotive Audiences at Scale with BENlabs AI
You’re here because you’re an automotive brand marketer looking to make a real connection with audiences so they don’t skip or ignore what you have to say. You’re thinking about influencer marketing, product placement, and getting your vehicle in the hottest music videos. Maybe you’re looking for the right brand integration agency for your automotive brand.
That’s BENlabs. We’ve helped clients like General Motors, CarMax, and Turo achieve incredible results across influencer marketing, product placement in movies and TV, music partnerships, and more.
Challenges Facing Automotive Marketing
There is no such thing as a captive audience anymore. You don’t need stats or data* to know that audience attention is split; that audiences have more choices of what to watch and where to watch it than ever before. Audiences don’t watch what’s on, they watch what they want, when, where, and how they want. *that doesn’t mean we’re not going to give you stats and data.
Ad Avoidance
Automotive audiences aren’t looking for you in magazines or sitting through TV ads. Instead, they’re discovering new brands and trends through automotive influencers, getting car buying tips and advice from their favorite automotive content creators. They’re skipping ads the second they get the option and are being exposed to products, including automotive products, through their favorite music, movie, TV, and social content. At BENlabs, we’ll craft recommendations across the entertainment landscape so you’re there, in all the right places.
Decentralized Content
On their own, automotive blogs and traditional automotive critics aren’t the main drivers for buying decisions. Instead, online video factors heavily into vehicle purchase decisions, with three in four buyers engaging with online video before they buy.
Movies, music, TV, and social media split audiences. There isn’t any one source that all people go to for automotive advice or content. automotive brands need to show up meaningfully, in multiple places, to really make an impact with their audiences.
Data Intelligence and Reporting
95% of car buyers live online. Twice as many people do their research online vs. at the dealership. Despite this, data-backed insights for many automotive brands are lagging.
Showing up in social feeds, with music artists, in movie theaters or on the hot streaming show is great, but automotive brands need to know exactly how these content engagements drive brand activations back to their business and how they move the needle on growth KPIs. They need a partner who can draw real, actionable insights from structured and unstructured data.
BENLabs Helps Automotive Brands Stand Out
We offer a full suite of AI-driven marketing services ranging from influencer integrations to product placement. Our self-serve AI SAAS puts the BENlabs AI tools, trained over nearly 30,000 campaigns, in your hands. BENlabs proprietary AI models will help your automotive brand find receptive audiences, level-up your content, and drive audience action with predictable, measurable results against your KPIs.
When you work with BENlabs, you set up your automotive brand for success with brand affinity, increased recall, and sales… but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Automotive Brands Are Fighting for Attention
On average, people spend 6.7 years of their life on social media. By contrast, they spend under two years socializing IRL. People watch 5.7 hours of video a day on average, but they’re not watching in any one place. They’re accessing billions of hours of video content spread across thousands of streaming services and social platforms. 93% of us listen to music regularly, and the 27-42 year-olds (millennials) listen 75.1% more than older generations.
There are exciting statistics for any automotive brand that has learned to adapt, developing deep audience intelligence to meet prospects where they live online. On the flip side, it’s damning data for any brand that sees the diminishing returns on their marketing efforts and doesn’t find the right partner to help them go where the data leads.
For brands, it comes down to a need to get noticed. It’s about more than showing up; your automotive product or brand needs to stand out. To make a real connection with audiences.
Knowing where to reach automotive audiences is important, knowing how to reach them is at least as important.
Are People Skipping Your Automotive Ads?
Looking at a group of 10 people, nine of them skip ads — including automotive ads. Let’s be honest here; the one remaining person probably got up to grab a snack. Four of the 10 take a more proactive approach and block ads entirely.
The answer isn’t unskippable ads. The answer is to make ads unskippable.
A Chevrolet Corvette in FREE GUY
What Does it Mean to be Unskippable?
Unskippable ads make automotive brand messages an important part of the content. We’re not talking about auto enthusiast influencers saying “This video has been brought to you by…” Rather, it’s aligned content creators across all of entertainment — influencer marketing, product placement in TV and movies, music and artist activations — that use your vehicles and products as inspiration to create authentic content that connects with audiences.
How to Make Your Automotive Brand Unskippable
Creators build a relationship with their audience through their content (whether the creator is a social influencer or a entertainment production house). Being unskippable is all about building your relationship with your target audience through that content.
It’s important to think beyond simply automotive content (automotive-related movies, TV shows, music, or automotive influencers) and to unlock the insights that extend your reach and expand your audiences.
With the power of BENlabs AI in your hands, data will match you with the authentic integration opportunities into content your target audience loves.
GMC Hummer EV in QUEER EYE Season 7
Challenges in Automotive Audience Intelligence
As individuals, personal privacy is important. As marketers, personal privacy is a huge challenge and fundamentally changes the way we market. Today, if our group of 10 people are also iPhone users, eight of them (well eight and half, 85%) have turned on privacy features that make them impossible to know individually.
It’s not just iPhone users. With personal privacy taking precedence and with third-party cookies going away, 10 out of 10 people become unknowable on an individual level.
Add to this the fractured attention we’ve talked about; not just different content creators on different social platforms vying for attention but every show and movie on every streaming service, every movie in theaters or on demand, every new music video, every emerging music artist rising to fame on social media or elsewhere.
Knowing your audiences is key to successful automotive brand integrations. BENlabs AI, specifically audience cluster analysis, is the key that unlocks deep audience intelligence while honoring individual privacy.
How to Gain Automotive Audience Insights
The answer to understanding audiences on an individual level isn’t trying to find the gray areas of personal privacy, it’s using AI tools to understand individual behavior without the need for personal data.
BENlabs AI helps marketers build out this deep and granular picture. Our AI tools have been awarded multiple marketing intelligence patents and make all the difference for automotive brands looking to make an impact in automotive influencer marketing and other brand integrations. With these AI tools and BENlabs’ decades of experience across all of entertainment — movies, TV, music and music videos, in creator content on social media — automotive brands unlock incredible integration opportunities.
Cluster Analysis
Build a clear picture of what content your target engages, unlocking new audiences and new opportunities
Creator Matching
Discover the qualified voices that have the most influence with your most receptive audience segments
Predictive Analytics
Incredible AI-driven predictive accuracy that tells you how audiences will act, expected ROI, CAC, brand awareness, lift, and other KPIs
Competitor Intelligence
See everything your competitors are doing, what’s working and what’s not, to steal away awareness and market share
Stealing Market Share with Sticky Awareness
Turo offers a new take on car rentals with vehicle sharing. Renters enjoy a smooth rental experience, a wide selection of vehicles. The challenge for Turo was to build the kind of “sticky awareness” that would change vehicle rental behavior down the road, when someone was getting ready to rent a vehicle. That’s where BENlabs comes in.
Turo’s content creator influencer campaign, led by BENlabs and its AI tools, led to a 305% awareness lift with 46% of exposed audiences considering Turo for their next rental, and 39% brand recall four weeks after exposure. The campaign “stole” 44 points of awareness from vehicle rental industry leaders (a key KPI) with 37% awareness stolen from the category leader.
Brand Content Integration is the Answer for Automotive Brands
So what’s a brand to do? Get placed in movies, music, and TV content? Kick off an influencer marketing effort? Hire an automotive brand agency? Well yes, but those don’t have to be separate efforts or involve a bunch of different vendors.
Automotive Influencer Marketing
BENlabs helps marketers take their influencer marketing efforts to the next level.
Our AI tools build a complete picture of your current audience but more than that, they unlock new, receptive audience clusters based on where those audiences live online. BENlabs AI is the key that unlocks an individual’s online “neighborhood,” with no individual tracking required.
Even working with smaller, niche automotive content creators in highly targeted verticals, automotive brands can reach audiences at an incredible scale.
When CarMax needed to stand out and get attention as a better way to buy a used car, a simple commercial wouldn’t cut it. They turned to BENlabs and our AI-driven approach to content, creator, and audience mapping. The result was brand-inspired content, delivered in organic on-screen moments on shows including Jimmy Kimmel Live and Nancy Drew.
CarMax achieved a 9.3% lift in website traffic among its target demo and a 20-point lift in its overall brand rating. With a 66% unaided brand recall among exposed audiences, CarMax would come to mind for two-thirds of people then next time they thought about shopping for a used vehicle.
General Motors (GM) is a leader in brand integrations, thanks to its nearly 40 years partnership with BENlabs. In Transformers 5, Little Big Lies, Queer Eye and many others, GM vehicles have taken a starring role.
In other words, you’ve seen BENlabs’ at work, even if you didn’t realize it.
Automotive Product Placement
BENlabs deep relationships across all entertainment unlocks opportunities for automotive brands in movies, TV, and music videos. From prop placements to deep brand spotlights that are an important part of the plot, we can help your brand stand out in authentic, story-driven, unskippable moments.
Automotive Music Activations
In addition to placing products in music videos, a relationship with BENlabs means unprecedented access to established and emerging music artists. From brand integration in music videos to unskippable influencer-style brand activations with the hottest artists, to music licensing and even custom brand-driven new music opportunities, BENlabs is where it happens.
Chevrolet placement in Chris Young music video
Let’s Take Your Automotive Brand to the Next Level
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