Andrew Street
Welcome to “Word on the Street: Automotive Digital Marketing for Car Dealerships”. I’m Andrew Street, podcast host. Today I’m going to share insights on how dealers can really begin to unlock AI for competitive advantage, really how to start using generative AI. To make this happen. I’ve got the field expert with me, Scott Meyer. He’s no stranger to automotive and marketing and design. Scott, will you give a quick background maybe with what you’ve done in Auto and your time with NADA and Nine Clouds?

Scott Meyer
For sure. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I’m Scott Meyer. Great to be here, and it’s fun to come back to the automotive world. I spent almost a decade founding and growing Nine Clouds, which was a digital marketing firm focusing on automotive dealers. So, we worked throughout North America, mostly with dealership groups that had roughly 5 points to 20 points, kind of in that range. Did everything from content generation to ads to analytics, and did a lot of teaching, which I think has been a through line throughout my life. I started as a professor way back in the day while I was getting my master’s degree, went into tech and actually used teaching as like a sales tool, where I would go to NADA and Digital Dealer and just teach people how to use at that time, social media and Facebook ads to sell cars. And I’ve kind of continued that. I moved from running an agency to working in higher education, starting entrepreneurship centers. And then I’ve been deep into AI, teaching how to use AI first with developers for the past 18 months or so, and then the past six months or so as the kind of AI wave has come, teaching more businesses as well. So, really love inspiring people to start. I think the hardest part of any new technology is being brave enough to try something and fail at it. And what’s great about AI is the cost of failure is zero, because you can just try again, try again, try again. And so, whether you’re writing text, generating images, getting insights from your own sales data, writing marketing copy, if you don’t like it, you just ask again. And so, I think all of us can stand to get over that elementary school fear of looking stupid and just jump into this technology because it’ll help us, what I always say, live well and work smart. So, I think that’s kind of where we’re headed.

Andrew Street
What are some of the bigger platforms for AI that you’re focused on?

Scott Meyer
Yeah, I think it’s good to group them essentially by how they function. Like, text to text would be one way to think about it, or text to image. So, text to text would be where you put in a question or a statement and then you’re going to get text back. So, most of us are familiar with Chat GPT as a great example of this. Other tools that I always like to point out as different examples, I think that ChatPDF is a really great one. You can upload any PDF and then ask questions about the PDF. So, you could imagine you could actually empower your customers to upload their user manual and then ask questions about how to use the features in their car, right? You could upload a contract and ask questions about it. So, I think that’s a fun use case. Not many people are familiar with text to image would be tools like Mid Journey or Adobe Firefly where you can actually give a prompt and get an image back that’s really great for marketing material. If you think about having images on a blog post or an annual report, or even those images for Facebook ad, you could generate those with a few lines of text. And then you also have like image to image, which is becoming pretty interesting, where you upload, say, an image of your vehicle or your dealership, and then you can have iterations or variations of it. So, you could upload your Ford Focus and ask it to make it not in the snow, but instead in the summer, right. Or instead of having it in front of the dealership, put it on the beach or whatever it might be. So, that’s kind of an image to image. And that, again, could be done with Midjourney tools like Dolly, two things like that. So, I kind of think a lot about those areas. And I think the way to get started in my mind is with Chat GPT because it’s free, it’s easy, and I think a lot of us have maybe played around with it. So, I think a lot about some of the frameworks to use AI so we can dive into those. But that’s kind of some of the tools I like to highlight.

Andrew Street
Yeah. And what’s exciting about all of this is it’s a really low barrier of entry. Like you’re saying. It’s like you can do Mid Journey on your phone if you have Discord, you can do Chat GPT now easily from your phone. Instead of having the Adobe Creative suite and having gobs of hours behind the wheel, making Creative, making graphic design, figuring out layers, figuring out the Lasso tool and all the stuff that goes into Photoshop and Illustrator. I’m trying. To get my five-year-old to check this out and all of my staff with our ad agency to really dig in and learn how to become better prompt engineers and come up with better prompts and how to iterate and then how to edit, do little fact checking and then edit with if we’re doing copy or if we’re doing creative. That’s everything. Those are the two things for advertising. And if we have really good copy and then we’ve got great creative and we can put little things know, a prompt to make vehicle look like it’s in northwest Austin because we’re going to target northwest Austin with these. Ads and have a woman with her children next to the vehicle and have copy that caters to affluent mothers that’s persuasive to step into the luxury of the BMW X5. Actually, got a sample of it here. Let me show it real quick. I don’t even know how this is going to relay, but if you’re watching this on video, this was created in less than 60 seconds. And it’s a BMW that looks like it’s in my neighborhood in Austin. And I put in a prompt that’s just “4K realistic BMW X5 photograph shot on this type of camera”. Oh, this is South Austin. “Trendy South Austin neighborhood, near side view during sunset, a young mother with her children.” And then here’s what was huge for me: It’s the aspect ratio. It’s been really hard as advertisers to get this 9 x 16 aspect ratio, which takes up your entire phone for stories, for reels. And it’s just manufacturers and dealers and even agencies are historically bad at getting that long, tall aspect ratio. This nails it into a 9 x 16 and then Jasper, just licks it with the copy. Just, “Hey, Austin moms! Discover the 2024 BMW SUV lineup, perfect for stylish busy families”. Headline is “Luxury Meets Family Life”. Description is “Explore BMW SUVs Today”. So, like, all this copywriting and the creative is arguably here. I’m going to stop sharing better than like if I get the best copywriters from the best journalism school. And great designers, they’ll come up with great stuff, but this helps them. This fuels their ability to come out with a huge velocity of really good creative to split test. Yeah. And so, I feel like the design background is helpful and copywriting background is pretty helpful, but what’s your take, then? Just anybody can hop in and really start to understand?

Scott Meyer
So, the thing that excites me about AI is it really democratizes creativity. And I believe all of us are creative. We all have ideas in our head. But the barrier for a lot of us, like me, is like, I can’t make my hand draw the thing in my head, right? I imagine what my house looks like, and I try to draw it and it looks like a square, right? And a lot of us are at that point. And so, for a long time, we relied on people who would have the right tool to bring the idea out and put it onto the piece of paper or the screen. And what AI does is allows us to all do that, to really just quickly keep improving our questions until we get the thing we want. And so, it’s not a matter of skill anymore, it’s just a matter of the idea. And so, anyone can do this, but there’s a lot of frameworks that help do it faster and better. I think about you’re now becoming the CEO of Design or the CEO of Copywriting, where you have to do what I call the AI sandwich, which it starts with a human. You start with a question or a prompt. You let the AI do its thing, create its output, and then you’re going to edit it and tweak it on the back end. So, I think for designers or copywriters, it’s not something to fear. It’s really, I can now create so many variations and then bring that variation into photoshop and add the text and the date and tweak the lighting, know, copy and paste it into different sizes or whatever. It’s just like you come up with more ideas, though, when you’re able to throw things at it. And it’s like if you took a bunch of photos in South Austin and then the next week you had to do something for North Austin, now you have to hire the photographer, you have to get on the schedule, you have to do all this stuff. Whereas instead with AI, we can just take the photo that you just had from South Austin and then put it into AI and say, now change it to look more like rural North Austin in the suburbs or whatever, and bam, there it is, right? And so, it’s still based on what you created, but it’s going to be more accurate. So, AI sandwich is a really big framework. I always tell people, regardless of the tool, whether it’s image or text, you’re always going to have to have you at the beginning, then AI, and then you at the end. And I think you at the end is the piece people don’t always expect. They hope to do what’s called one shot prompting, where they just ask one question, get what they want. What works much, much better is what’s called multi shot prompting, where you’re going to have a conversation with the AI. So, first you’re going to say, hey, we want to have like just like you did, we want an image like this. And then it’s going to come back and you’re saying, great, now can you give me a variation where it’s a front on photo with a dad and a son? Right? And now you’re going to get another variation. Now we want to move it to North Austin. You’re going to get another one. So, you have this conversation back and forth instead of expecting to get the perfect thing right away. So, it’s kind of this concept of you don’t have to be right right-away because you get unlimited chances. It’s kind of like rolling a dice in a game. You just keep rolling until you get what you want. So, I think the multi shot prompting is a really important framework for people to think about. The other example, or the framework I like to tell people, I call it the Apprentice model, which is essentially how do you show AI what you want and then ask the question. So, I’ll give you kind of two things to think about. I always tell people if you’re going to use text to text, you want to use what I call the R.I.P. model. So, you want to give AI a role. You want to give it an instruction and then you want to give it parameters. And so, the role would be something like you are an expert copywriter living in Texas. The instruction is “Create me a blog post about why life is so much better in a BMW.” And the parameters would be something like “Make it 800 words. Make sure to use the words ‘local Austin dealer’ so that we rank for SEO”. And the parameter could also be “Make it similar to this blog post,” right? So, you put in that prompt, but then underneath it you say “make it like this”. And you actually post one of your previous blog posts, the example that you like. And now it’s going to write in your voice, right? So, you’re giving it consistency across content. Same thing with images, right? Like create an image like this and you can add the image you just had so that your future images match it. So, you have a brand, you have consistency. So, that’s kind of what I call like the R.I.P. method or the apprentice model, where you can give it a role, the instruction, and the parameter, and show the example. I use this a lot with when I work with nonprofits writing grants. You think about anything that takes a lot of text and you want to make it in a certain way. You can upload your previous grants and then say, okay, now answer this question. You put in question one. It answers it. Now question two. Now question three. So, instead of putting the whole grant in, you just go question by question with the example. You can do the same thing with your radio ads, right? Your TV scripts, whatever you think has been really good, show it to the AI. Because I think about AI is like a happy puppy. It just wants to please you. And the more you can train it on what you want it to do, it’ll do that, right? So, make a TV script like this one that we did in 2016 that was so hilarious. And now it’s going to create ten variations of it. Or give me ten email headlines similar to this email that was really successful last year. And there you go. So, you can really use your data and your previous experience to train the model. So, I just threw a ton at you. But for anyone listening, this is what I do on a daily basis. I have a site called FiveMin.AI So, it’s FiveMin.Ai and I just put up tutorials almost every day on how to do this stuff. Because if you’re scared you are not going to learn, you just have to start, right? I always say you have to try it, apply it and then amplify it. So, you try implementing it in your life. If it works, then apply it to a problem you have. And if that works, then teach your colleagues. And that’s kind of how you kind of really start to use this stuff. Not just personally, but also across the business. So, I’ll let you talk now. Mr. Street. I’ve been hogging the mic.

Andrew Street
No, it’s great. Like, it’s cool. I love the way that you look at it with the sandwich and with it being just text to text, text to image. It’s a much simpler way to look at it than kind of getting on Chat GPT and then being like, “okay, do I use this like Google?” Then you can pretty quickly, within ten minutes, figure out really how to prompt and direct it.

Scott Meyer
Something not a lot of people know with Chat GPT is you can personalize it. So, like we just talked about, you give it a personality, you give it examples, but it actually saves that chat. So, when you look on the left-hand sidebar, you can anytime go back into that chat, and it’ll remember what you did. So, you don’t have to do this every single time. What I typically recommend people do is come up with three or four personalities that you use the most, right? So, you’re probably going to have your SEO copywriting personality. You might have your financial business strategy personality. I have one that’s like my home virtual assistant personality that’s talking about when to take kids to events, what kind of food to cook, things like that. But what’s powerful is you can actually share that. So, if you have one person on your team who takes five minutes maybe to give examples and start to tell the AI what to be like, now, that person can send a link to all their colleagues, and everyone who puts in a question will be working off of the same personality. And I just think that’s like a massive power people haven’t even begun to explore. Is that through Chat GPT. All Chat GPT. Yeah. Just on the left-hand side, you click on the chat, there will be a little arrow, and it’ll say share and you can share it. And so, what I always recommend is just number. Put a number between the chats you’re going to use the most. So, I have four of them, and then I can just look. Number one is always my blog post that I have trained on how to write things. Number two is my podcast, right? So, like, transcribing my podcast and creating show notes. Number three is my personal assistant in the home, and number four is for my wife who runs a jewelry shop called Sal Hill Gallery. And it’s all about creating content around unique engagement rings in, you know, I just go to the chat, and you reuse that. If you just start from scratch, it’ll create a new chat and then you got to retrain it. So, it’s good to have a few that you use over and over.

Andrew Street
Okay. You had mentioned something about using it to really analyze contracts, sift through data, maybe CRM data. One thing that was mind blowing is I’m trying to sell a little piece of property. I’m getting a listing agent and they sent me a long contract and I’ve got a real estate attorney and Chat GPT was able to produce more objections and concerns than the real estate attorney, which is interesting, and the prompt is just, okay, you’re acting as an advocate for the seller. You don’t want the seller to be tied to paying any commissions until the check is cleared and prompted it to be my biggest advocate. And it came up with ten really good concerns that popped up out of that contract. And now I’m uploading databases from our customers of their CRM and finding common threads to help our team make faster, smarter marketing decisions based on their data, inventory levels, customers profitability per RO, profitability per car sold. What do you-

Scott Meyer
Let me put it this way: Chat GPT is the best debate partner you could ever have. So, whether you’re writing an English paper and you say “what are the weakest parts of my argument?” or you are a dealer, and you want to decide “are we charging enough for these services?”.  You upload your prices, the number of sales you have, you ask Chat GPT “which one’s underperforming?” and then ask it, “why does it think it might be underperforming?” and start a conversation about that. Or you’re trying to train your sales staff or your phone staff. Like, “how do I overcome the most common objections that I would get about X car?” and now Chat GPT is going to give the objections and that person gets practice responding. And then you can ask Chat GPT like, “how could I improve?” Right? So, think about this as like, this is the best trainer a dealer could ever have for any department, right? Anyone who engages with language, Chat GPT is a perfect trainer, and we all use language in almost everything we’re doing, right? And I think about the business strategy, right? Like, you could even talk about where you’re located, what your marketing spend is. I think about the clients you work with analyzing how much you spent over six months, the clicks you got, and it’ll find the opportunities. Where would we move budget? What time of year are we maybe underperforming? Or which campaign drove the most action? How do we create five iterations of that? That’s all free and possible, and it might be 15 minutes. It’s wild. I would always have a new employee before they answer the phone. Do 20 practices on Chat GPT, right? That’s going to be more valuable than having someone over their shoulder doing it because it’s just fast and you can get feedback and review it. So, it’s so exciting. I get excited about it, and I think dealers should really think about it as: We’re not necessarily going to get rid of employees, we’re going to make them 30% more effective with a few days of work.

Andrew Street
Yeah. You know what my analogy is, (I’m trying to think of right now) is “The Four Hour Work Week”, the Tim Ferriss book while I was reading it’s, like, yeah, sure, you can pare your work down to that, but it’s like, why would you not have ten of those companies then, if you can actually do that much? Same with your staff, same with leveraging this as a springboard. It’s okay. What if you can do ten times the volume and ten times the quality of work? Now your dealership is able to produce really good social media content and TikTok videos and scripts just by being really good at prompting and then kind of urging the script in the right direction to where it sounds like you, where it sounds like something fun, where it’s not a stale dealership. Look at this other car, look at this other car. We have inventory and prices, but it’s something much more personable coming out of a robot.

Scott Meyer
Well, let’s make it really actionable. So, if you’re listening to this, here’s how you get started. You just search Chat GPT, click into it, and what I want you to do is go to your outbox in your email and just find an email that you sent to a customer and copy and paste it in Chat GPT. And then just ask Chat GPT, how could I improve this email? Right? And it’s going to rewrite it for you and make some changes and then go to your list of the customers you have to reach out to that day. Tell Chat GPT, write an email to Andrew Street and give him a few details. So, Andrew’s looking at this vehicle, he has three kids and he’s trying to find financing. And now Chat GPT is going to write that email for you based on what you just showed it. So, it’s speaking in your voice. It’s going to write you an email in three to 4 seconds. And now you copy paste that. And again, remember the AI sandwich, you probably are going to have to delete a few things. Maybe you want to add a few things you link to whatever deal you have going, but it’s going to be seconds, not minutes or half hour, right? And I think so often we hit this blank page and you get that writer’s block. Or like, I’ll do that later. Don’t do that, just go do it. And you could even do it in mass, right? So, I can copy paste all the customers I have to talk to today, put a few details about each one. Maybe you can even pull it from a spreadsheet. And then just ask Chat GPT to write those emails to all of those people and it’s just going to spit them all out. And now you’re copy pasting that in, you’re writing personal emails. I work a lot in education, and although teachers moan about chat, GPT and cheating, every teacher I know is using it for letters of recommendation. Right? So, any task that we have that is somewhat repetitive, that requires language, this is perfect. So, start with email. Everyone writes emails, right? That’s going to be an easy way to try it very low stakes, and then just go from there.

Andrew Street
What do you feel like a good resource for dealers could be? Like a one-page cheat sheet. Do you think we could just…like I’m thinking about eventually building out something just to handout at when we do workshops. Like, this is going to be a component of it for the foreseeable future. Maybe just a handful of prompts that we’ve found help generate some of the better content for email marketing. For copywriting.

Scott Meyer
Yeah, prompt guide. I think there’s a lot of them out there. I wouldn’t have one to point to specifically, but that’s something that I think you should make. Andrew, I think that would be great. Happy to do so. At FiveMin.AI, we make videos, so there’s a lot of examples there. I don’t have anything dealer specific right now, but I’m happy to build that out. And I think use cases are really important. People will learn if it’s solving a problem. So, organizing that or thinking about it as, okay, I need to write emails faster, I need to find sales information, I need to make marketing decisions, and then the prompts will come. But I think knowing the goal will really help you. And just remember that you can give it an example because most of us have an example not only in our mind, but also on our computer of what we’re trying to get right? Like, we’re trying to get a spreadsheet, we’re trying to get an ad, we’re trying to get a blog post. Just show it and then it’s going to be a lot easier to get there.

Andrew Street
Okay. Scott so it sounds like if people want to really get quick tutorials from you personally, they start by going to FiveMin.AI

Scott Meyer
Yeah, exactly. And then on there, if you want to go know, we have free tutorials that are on YouTube and on FiveMin.AI, and then also do training. Right. So, if you just want to jump on a call for 90 minutes and come up with a strategy to train your team. If you want to dive deeper yourself, learn how to do image generation, learn how to maybe do some of the more advanced stuff. Build a chat bot for your company, all this kind of more advanced things. Happy to do that. But a lot of people are just like, “I want someone to hold my hand”. And that’s something I’ve learned my entire career, starting back in teaching in university, running a marketing agency is you show someone how to do it and they’re like, “Oh, that’s really cool. Can you help me?” It’s a little scary to go out on your own and just do it by yourself. So, happy to jump on a consulting call, and you can just book those calendar links right there and then work through it together. Bring your teammates on. I do a lot of team training as well, so I just did one yesterday for a group of 15 nonprofit employees. And that’s really fun because you can actually bring specific projects, right? Like, we’re a dealer that we’re trying to launch a new point here’s, all the things we need to do. How could AI save us time? So, that’s a great option, too, where we can actually bring the whole team in. You can send over projects ahead of time and kind of make a strategy. So, happy to do free tutorials one-on-one or the strategy. And mostly I just want people to try this because I do think once you get in there a little bit, it’ll help you live better. You can actually get some time back, and you can also work smarter, like spend time doing the part that’s creative, which is, what are we going to sell? Who are people that I should work with? Are my employees in a good place? Do they have the support they need? It’s hard to do that stuff if you’re just trying to get blog posts out the door, right? So, I think AI really helps us focus on the hard work that we should be doing rather than the mundane.

Andrew Street
Scott, I’m going to have to lure you out into an automotive conference at some point and hop up as soon as we get a refined curriculum together. Specific for dealers. I’m going to coerce you out back into auto for at least one day. And guys, if you want any more details anymore, the podcast is just DealerOMG.com/Podcast or email info@dealeromg.com for any suggestions on guests. Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast channels, and please share with others. Again, I’m Andrew Street. This is Scott Meyer. Dude, thanks. We’re going to have to probably revisit this soon.

Scott Meyer
I’m always available. Great to catch up, Andrew. And anyone listening, hope that you’re working with him. If you’re not, jump on board. He’s a forward thinker and a good friend from the good old days. So, great to connect again.

Andrew Street
Likewise.