From Inspiration to the Driveway: Allison McConoghy on the Pinterest Auto Revolution

Hey guys, my next guest, Alison McConeghy built Pinterest’s automotive ads team from scratch. And over the last nine years, she’s worked with tier one, tier two. Now she’s really focused on dealerships and empowering them through agencies. She’s the one from, uh, Detroit. She’s got automotive chops. She’s behind all of the case studies that Pinterest and dealerships are putting out right now that prove that Pinterest can move metal. They can sell trucks, not just plan weddings and remodel kitchens. Enjoy this conversation.

Well allison you’ve been with pinterest for nearly a decade which kudos for the loyalty and working in automotive And could you quickly give us like a quick background with your auto jobs as well as your platform marketing jobs? Sure. So I’ve been working in automotive since twenty twelve. I started working in auto at Pandora Radio on the sales team. So building up the tier one business for FCA at the time and GM primarily. I was there for almost six years and transitioned roles several times, ultimately ending up in a audience data role, which is really interesting, helping kind of bridge the gap between third party data providers and the OEMs. From there, I came over to Pinterest, where I’ve been for almost nine years. So when I started, I was employee number three in the Detroit office. And so we were just trying to stand up the business. So focused on tier one, primarily with GM and Ford, And over several years, we were able to build up a really healthy tier one business. And then we branched into tier two. I really got to kind of build out my expertise with GM on their tier two program, which was really exciting. And then ultimately, once you build up enough success in business, the question comes like, well, what can you do for our dealers? So in twenty twenty, I spun off to stand up our dealer business and I’ve been working on it ever since. It’s a tough thing to scale. Like I’ve seen several platforms try to scale across because there’s whatever, eighteen thousand franchise dealers and countless independent dealers. So I imagine a lot of that time is spent like empowering agencies and marketers. And is that where a lot of the energy is spent or is it also directly with dealers or dealer groups? Great question. Primarily with agency partners. So to your point, scale is always a challenge. So we have to maximize our ability to get in front of as many dealers as possible. So that’s typically through their agency partners. So we’ve built out a great agency program with several different partnership tiers, you know, based on investment and partnership over time. But in addition, we do have dealer groups that we’re super close with that we get in front of whenever they need us. And we also leverage our tier one relationships to get in front of their retail teams, right? Because they have a vested interest in ensuring that their dealers are successful in their markets, that they’re pushing the best ideas out there and partnering with the best partners. And so we’re able to kind of work that angle as well, which is a really healthy way to approach the business. Right, and get it from the top down where they can help evangelize and talk about best practices and find excuses for dealers to get started. Yes, absolutely. So in the ten years that you’ve been doing auto with Pinterest, how do you feel like dealers have kind of shifted their mindset around the platform? Yes, great question. So when we started to stand up this business in twenty twenty, it was obviously challenging for so many reasons. But focusing on the Pinterest challenge, we got a lot of pushback saying, well, isn’t Pinterest just a platform for women? and women who are planning their weddings or their nurseries. And we had to kind of push back against that and say, yes, there are a lot of women on Pinterest, but you should care because women power eighty percent of card buying decisions. So please don’t dismiss that very powerful audience. And then in addition, these women and men are on Pinterest planning for life events. And so why does that matter to a dealer? Because when people are cycling through life moments like getting married or having a baby, they’re two and a half times more likely to be in market for a new vehicle within the next twelve months. So it gives dealers this beautiful opportunity to get in front of the consumer before they might even be in market or realize that they’re going to need a new vehicle. But this massive life change that they’re going through is going to spur that need for a new vehicle. And what really opened my eyes to Pinterest advertising I’m a man, I don’t know if you can tell, but I did a landscaping job at my house. And while I was working with the landscapers and looking at options, I was building out a Pinterest board. And all the ads were so relevant with flagstones and with landscape lighting. And it really pulled me in and it started impacting my decisions and the products that I was buying. And then as we’re like starting to test it out more and more and more with dealerships that we’re working with for social advertising, what I love most is the lack of noise. It’s such a clean environment to advertise in because there’s not every single dealership in there running the exact same ads. It’s an opportunity for us to get in front of a niche audience, seeing a life event that’s coming up. They’re having a child. They’re getting married. things like that to get out in front of them. Is this a part of the big value proposition that you guys are introducing to dealers? Absolutely. So Pinterest is a little bit different than other social platforms because traditional social platforms connect people to people. And that’s incredibly powerful. But what’s equally powerful is a platform that connects people to ideas. And that’s what Pinterest does. And so because of that shift and where we sit within the ecosystem, it does create this open space for dealers to really kind of put the stake in the ground in terms of their geographic area. And there’s a lot of opportunity for them to get in front of this high intent audience that is affluent and can actually afford their vehicles. Yeah. And make decisions and start making actions towards starting a conversation with the dealership and that’s making me think about like um like an issue that we’ve come across a lot is dealers being really predisposed and taught to look at google analytics as the proxy for any digital marketing success and so they’re looking to us as a marketing agency to make this kpi hit and that’s a lot of times just like a vdp view Which is pretty easy to trick and just flow a lot of really unqualified traffic to VDPs and call that a win for the agency. But what we see is it just commoditizes the dealership and it drives a bunch of bad traffic and the retargeting audiences are not applying very well. And so there’s kind of like this education process that I think that happens with a lot of dealerships about keeping people on the platform versus trying to cram them through your website, cram them through your credit apps. How is that conversation going with you? Does that come up a lot where dealerships are wanting to look at Google Analytics and agencies are talking about volume of traffic and time on site and stuff like that? Yes. Yeah. It comes up all the time. And so we really take kind of an educational perspective on measurement. So Google analytics really heavily weighs last click, which is not going to showcase the power of Pinterest, right? Pinterest is an earlier touch platform and it’s a platform that people continuously come back to, especially when they’re planning something like a new car purchase. you know, they’re saving ideas around their next vehicle onto things like boards, and then they’re coming back to that board to refine that consideration set. And then from there, they’re going to the dealer site and then ultimately purchasing. So if you’re only measuring last click, you’re going to lose out on all of that great behavior that Pinterest generated for you. So we encourage our agency partners really always to install the Pinterest tag at a bare minimum, right? We need to see what’s happening post-click on the dealer site. But in addition, we really encourage them to upload the sales data every single month to the dealer’s ad account to match back to ad exposure. And we find that the agency partners that do that have a very strong story to tell about a very efficient cost per vehicle sold and the number of sales that Pinterest influenced during that month. Okay, that gives me like two questions. One is like with the attribution, you’re able to look at the, you put the Pinterest pixel on the website, set it up to measure conversions with meaningful things for the dealer, not VDP views, but trade in appraisals, credit apps, you know, lead gen phone calls, stuff like that. And it sounds like you’re able to do the match back to people being exposed to the ad, at least, even if they didn’t jump through all of the hoops, which a lot of people don’t. What does that look back look like? Is it a thirty day or? Yes, we need the So a list uploaded within thirty days of the end of the campaign, but you can adjust the look back window up to ninety days, which we always recommend because, again, Pinterest is an earlier touch platform. But many of our agency partners maintain a thirty thirty attribution window just to have parity across partners. And even within that tighter window, Pinterest tends to be a top performer. It’s a good time. And then you, so you came to NADA, right? You did a presentation I heard was super well attended. I wish I had been more on top of my schedule. I would have checked it out. But you were talking about how Pinterest, or pinners that were exposed to more of a full funnel campaign on Pinterest converted two times higher than what? What was the presentation about? Yes. Yep. So our strategy for dealers is always to have a full funnel strategy active on Pinterest. So that’s going to include an awareness campaign. The awareness campaign is really going to highlight the why buys for your dealership and to set you apart within the market in which you operate. From there, our mid funnel strategy is going to be either a consideration or conversion campaign. That’s where we’re really layering in offer and incentive messaging. And then finally our lowest funnel is our shopping campaigns. So those are feed based. So you’re just syndicating your inventory onto Pinterest directly. That feed automatically updates every twenty four hours to ensure that the vehicle that is on your lot is being advertised. And when it sells today, it’s not there tomorrow. So we have found that when dealers have that full funnel strategy active, they do see two times the conversion behavior. than a single strategy alone. And that’s been proven out not only within the automotive vertical, but broader at Pinterest. And it really just speaks to that earlier touch planning mindset that our consumers have. So we want to make sure that our dealers are capturing that full opportunity versus just syndicating their inventory on our platform. Which is kind of the crux. And in my experience, a way that a marketing firm or like an internal marketing agency with within a dealership or within anyone can separate themselves from other providers because the setting up the inventory feed, letting it run, having evergreen campaigns drives VDP traffic. And it’s easy. It should be easy. Yeah. And on like, I know on meta, like the move is just go with an open audience. Facebook kind of knows who’s in market and just let it run and it’ll continue to get a little bit better, but don’t touch it. And as marketers, we want to get in and tinker with stuff. But as a, as like a provider, if we can, what happened to my camera? Did I just go blurry on yours? You did great. Uh, I’ll switch cameras for now. There we go. Are we a technology company or what? I mean, things happen every time. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve tried like setting up my old phone as the camera. What we’re talking about is like what I was trying to talk about is just like the creative doing just the carousel ads versus coming up with something that’s a little bit more impactful and something that’s a little bit more personalized for the consumer, for the car buyer. What types of creative are you seeing that’s working well in auto right now? Yes. So to your point, you know, we do love the always on inventory syndication. We do think that is going to be like your base strategy across platforms. And we understand why, right? Like it’s incredibly powerful. It’s easy to attribute sales right back to that specific ad because it’s been based. But there is massive opportunity beyond that. And so that’s where we encourage our dealers and partners to build up that funnel. So starting at the awareness level, you know, phase, we like to see the why by messaging from our dealers. We love to see testimonials, right? Like, I think it’s really important to have that personal touch as to why should I come to your dealership, right? Like, what can I expect from you? Like, who are your people? Are you making your customers happy, right? Like that’s a dealer’s job and they do such a great job doing that. They need to highlight those stories for consumers that are going to be in market. And then in addition, there’s a massive opportunity to be a little bit more customized with your messaging to kind of give a personalized ad experience to a consumer based on who they are and what they’re looking for. So on Pinterest, like our bread and butter are affluent women, typically kind of that middle-aged millennial mom, people love to say. So these are women who are looking for higher end SUVs, vehicles that can fit their family and even pickup trucks, which people sometimes doubt us on, but we have the data to back it up. So if you can tie those types of vehicles to your audience, we tend to see much stronger, you know, click-through rates and engagement metrics because you’re delivering a message that actually matches what that consumer wants. And Pinterest has a ton of data to help inform who your audience is and what they’re looking for. And so we can kind of guide that process together with your agency partner. And you’re talking about, yeah, one thing that’s helping to get like good creative from dealers is we would make it in house, but it’s, not as good as if I can give the dealer and empower the dealership. We’ll send them a lapel mic, a QR code for how to make a hook and how to make a story. And we’ll do all the editing. And it performs so much better than if I’m just running inventory ads. And I think that’s a good move from the advertiser side to really get out and let dealers know what’s working well do this don’t do this find somebody that can get on camera shoot vertically use this lapel mic and you’re ninety eight percent of the way there absolutely and even very simple things that i think folks in the automotive industry forget is that people are not buying vehicles that often right i think it’s every ten years people typically are in market for a new vehicle so even like simple features like a hand free lift gate on the back of a vehicle showcasing, putting a stroller in the back of that SUV or minivan, just like something super simple, cut it down to a six or fifteen second video and showcasing that and matching that to your parent audience. That’s actually very helpful, right? Because they want to see how is this vehicle going to enhance and enable my life? Yeah. And Alison, like what you’re talking about too, it’s, um, not necessarily something that needs to be unique for Pinterest. If they shoot that content that can really be repurposed across a number of different channels. Absolutely. Even YouTube pre-roll, if it’s that short thing that has the, you know, called it, you know, a hook right at the beginning to get people to keep paying attention. And you’re talking about, uh, pairing inventory with audiences. Can you talk a little bit about uploading databases and life events and what kind of makes Pinterest unique for audience targeting? And if you use open audiences for collection or for inventory ads? Sure. So for inventory specifically, obviously a core audience that we’re going to recommend you go after is just like standard dynamic retargeting, right? But Pinterest has a ton of audience levers that you can pull based on what type of inventory you’re trying to move. So when a dealer uploads their inventory into Pinterest, they can segment it into product groups. That’s the technical term within our UI. And so you can have an SUV product group, truck, what have you, segment any which way you like. And then you can really tailor the targeting to match that product group, right? So if we’re trying to push pickup trucks, maybe we’re looking for a more male focused audience, perhaps a DIY or someone who is into sports content or even finance content, because all of those topics really over index with the truck buyer on Pinterest. And so we can showcase to our dealers and to our audience or agency partners how to pull those audience insights within their ads manager account. and get very granular and prescriptive with those targeting levers. But in addition, we don’t want to over engineer things, right? So we take it on kind of a case by case basis, depending on how sophisticated the dealer and the partner want to go. If they want more of a set it and forget it, we do have our performance plus solution, which is very similar to what other partners in the ecosystem offer in terms of just like campaign automation, right? we will find the person most likely to take action on this ad for you. You don’t have to set all of those targeting parameters. So there’s a great balance that you can strike depending on what your campaign goals are. Okay. and so it sounds like you can get really granular with the audiences and then like even like the catalogs too we can get pretty granular besides just like the the model or the um you know as a truck suv sedan but like let’s do vehicles under twenty thousand dollars let’s do certified pre-owned vehicles and talk about the reconditioning of the vehicles that they do to make them certified and what the value of a certified pre-owned vehicle is so i’m finding it to be more and more fun to get little you know think about the audience and keep messing with audiences a little bit but also like really like get that catalog of inventory really relevant absolutely and i think as we see the auto buyer kind of shift with this new generation of buyers you know up and coming it is really important to be a little bit more like price conscious for them because the average cost of a new vehicle is so high The average first time car buyer can’t afford a fifty thousand dollar vehicle. So what does the dealer have that kind of fills that void for that younger first time car buyer? And we’re actually kind of aging down as a platform. So as I mentioned earlier, our core audience has historically been affluent millennial women. But we are seeing our platform age down to Gen Z, which is going to kind of fill that gap for those first time car buyers, which is a great opportunity, again, for dealers to get in front of someone who’s never purchased a vehicle before, educate them on what that process could look like, and ensure that they’re giving them vehicle options that they can actually afford. Yeah. Uh, like it makes me think about like one of my favorite things about Pinterest. And I imagine you’ve noticed this, but when you get on Pinterest and you spend however many minutes on there and then you get off, you feel a little bit better. Yes. You don’t feel agonized about any geopolitics or any political slants. And it’s just like stuff that’s interesting to me. That’s tangible that, um, I think you guys own that spot and I hope it stays like that forever. Absolutely. Can you talk about the Healy Brothers case study? Is that what you talked about at NADA? So we talked about the first Healy Brothers case study at our last conference. Yes. We just actually published a new one. So to give some context, the first story came out in the twenty twenty one time frame. Healy Brothers is a pioneering automotive group in upstate New York who’s been a great partner to us. And they did some beta testing with us when we first brought inventory ads onto the platform. So we were able to prove out a very strong cost per vehicle sold and make some optimizations and report out on that during twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two. But since then, they have continued to be a very invested, loyal partner with us. And so we just recently revisited their performance on the platform to see what we have seen over time. And we are thrilled to report that we looked at twenty twenty five data year over year, twenty twenty four data. And we were able to drive twenty seven percent higher number of vehicle sales in twenty five versus twenty four at a forty percent lower cost per vehicle sold. So incredible amount of volume we’re able to drive for them at a very efficient cost per vehicle sold, which is just thrilling, right? Like that’s our job is to become more performant and a stronger partner to all of our dealers. And we were thrilled to be able to prove that and publish that out into the world. Yeah, and it’s fun too to have just like a dealer group that’s invested, that’s bought in, that you have some autonomy of like, hey, we’re going to try out something new. Yes. That I want you to be the first to try it. And not only your market, but in the world. And I think it’s going to work well. We’ll know pretty quickly. And yes, it’s getting some results. Let’s step on the gas. Let’s keep a close lens on this stuff. We’ve got a few dealers that are fun for us to be able to test out new things with. Yeah, absolutely. And it gives them competitive advantage in their market, right? Because they’re already learning what works, what doesn’t, and ahead of their peers. So it’s a win-win for all of us. Yeah, and you get a lot of attention on it from just like the platform side, from the agency side, the staff, and then hopefully the prospective buyers are getting to pay attention to it. You… So we’re working with you, we’re rolling out more dealerships right now and getting better with the creative use and with the tracking and setting up all the onsite tracking. Like when you’re talking with a new ad agency serving dealers, what is kind of, something that you’re asking from them or something that you’re suggesting that they start with just to get get uh some traction absolutely so when we’re onboarding a new partner you know the first step is always making sure like we get the pinterest tag placed on dealer sites right that is necessary to ensure that we have you know the minimum amount of measurement in place plus it’s an unlock for certain campaign types like conversions and shopping campaigns So that needs to be like the base layer from a measurement perspective. But from there, we always love to see partners that have more robust systems of measurement beyond that, because we have found that agency partners that do have access to dealer sales and upload it on a regular cadence or have in-house measurement solutions, like perhaps like a proprietary MMM model, We have found that Pinterest outperforms our peers in many of those measurement solutions, right? We typically do not outperform Meta when it comes to GA, right? Last click attribution models. Google is going to beat us in, Meta is going to beat us in. Meta is always going to drive more volume than Pinterest, like that’s where they win. But Pinterest wins when you look under the hood and you dive in a little bit deeper. And that’s because again, our audience is different. It’s a high intent audience that is very affluent and is actually purchasing new vehicles. So we may not drive the same amount of leads as peer platforms, but our leads are more powerful and they convert at higher rates. It’s a short conversation to have with a dealer, but it’s a nuanced one for like an account manager and for a salesperson to be able to talk about You know that last click attribution versus that story of the customer journey. And if we want to look at the last click attribution and where most things come from, it’s going to be like Google Maps or Apple Maps of people figuring out how to drive to the dealership, and that’s kind of the last click they took. So should we put all of our efforts into maps? Of course not. And there’s a company we partner with called Claravoy. Have you come across Claravoy? Yes. That helps spell out the customer journey that really has some good ability to highlight Pinterest along that journey and the impact that Pinterest does. So that’s something like we’ve rolled out with all of our dealerships now, and we can grow bigger retargeting audiences They’ll be at the Dealer Profitability Summit if you haven’t met them before. So I actually joined Steve White on a podcast on a yacht at Digital Dealer Tampa several years ago. But it was before we actually had a partnership together. So it was like kind of new information for both of us. But now many of our agency partners do partner with them. So we’re getting more access to their data. which is thrilling to see. And so I can’t wait to reconnect with them. Okay, good. Yeah. April sixteenth and seventeenth in Austin. If any dealers are listening that want to go, we still have like eleven tickets left. Okay, let’s say that that you’re a dealership. You work at a dealership. You’ve got maybe a couple thousand dollars to test out Pinterest. Where would you start? I would start with our tried and true full funnel strategy. So I would take about fifty percent of my budget and I would put it towards that shopping inventory syndication play. Right. Just get my inventory on there, set it, forget it, let that run. And then I would build up the funnel from there. Right. So I would put fifteen to twenty percent against that mid funnel. Marketing are different offers and incentives for the month. And then I would take that remaining percentage and put it against awareness, you know, with kind of a broader reach, looking to ensure that folks in my geo are aware of my store. They understand what differentiates us from the other dealership down the road and really giving them reason to come by and see us. Okay, that’s a that’s a step. I think that that dealers can take and especially agencies can take to help to this again, it’s like being on the platform with not a lot of noise, being in front of the decision makers, being in front of people during their life events is powerful for dealers. And we’ve tried to do on other platforms, but there’s such an indicator of life events on Pinterest, that nobody else can like share that signal. Yes. And beyond that, you know, dealers should be on every platform available to them, right? They should absolutely take advantage of all the players in the space. But if they’re not on Pinterest, they’re missing out on an incremental reach opportunity. And so I think that’s something that they don’t always understand. It averages out to about thirty percent of Pinterest users aren’t using meta platforms or TikTok or Snap or what have you. So if you are not on Pinterest, you’re losing out on market reach. So sometimes that little nugget of information can help move the needle for them because we know dealers want to be in front of every possible consumer within their geo. Yeah. And they want to do stuff that their competition is not doing, and they want to be the first in market to be doing something that nobody else is doing. um well what would you say for an agency or you know even a dealership what’s the best way to connect with you yeah reach out to us at dealer team at pinterest.com or you can find me on linkedin i get lots of messages there and i’m very responsive so allison mcconaghy but happy to help support we have a dedicated tier three team who is invested in growing these agency level partnerships as well as with dealers directly. So you will reach us. We don’t put you into a queue. You reach real people. We’ll get on the phone with you, get on zoom, talk through any challenges or help bring you up to speed on, you know, the nuances of our platform versus others. We’re really here to support and help ensure success for all of our partners. that is amazing allison mcconaughey i can’t thank you enough for your time and i look forward to getting together with you when you get in austin i can’t wait looking forward to it thanks