Driving up 82nd on Saturday I passed four dealerships in a row with maybe nine cars between them. Acres of painted asphalt and light poles and nothing to put under them. On the radio, a truck spot, a low voice telling me about capability.
Then a second one. Then a sedan.
Automakers are having their worst inventory year in living memory, the chips are not coming, and they are still buying more advertising than almost anyone else on earth. It is the most expensive category in the business, running at full volume, against shelves that are empty.
Advertising a product you cannot deliver is not a waste of money, but it is a completely different job from the one the creative was written to do.
The instinct in the room is to go dark and bank the savings. I understand it and I think it is wrong. Share of voice compounds, and the brands that vanished during the last downturn spent the following four years buying their way back to where they had been standing for free. Going quiet is cheap this quarter and expensive for the rest of the decade.
But the work has to change, and mostly it has not.
One. Stop selling urgency. Zero percent financing and act now, on a vehicle that arrives in March, is an insult with a production budget behind it. If there is no car, the ad's job is memory, not traffic. Build what people will feel in eighteen months when inventory returns and six competitors discount at once.
Two. Say the true thing about the wait. A few brands have started naming the shortage plainly and explaining how ordering works now. That is worth more than another montage of a truck on a ridge, because it is the actual question every customer walks in with.
Three. Whatever you spend nationally, the dealer is the brand this year. Somebody parks their car, walks in excited by a campaign, and gets shown a four thousand dollar market adjustment sticker on a car that is not there yet. A national campaign can build a brand for a decade and a market adjustment sticker can spend it in an afternoon.
A national campaign can build a brand for a decade and a market adjustment sticker can spend it in an afternoon.
That last one is not an advertising problem, which is why nobody in advertising will fix it. It is a question of whether the company means what its commercials say when meaning it costs margin. A lot of brands are failing that test quietly this year.
I did karaoke Friday, the sticky-floored place off Belmont, and sang Life Is a Highway with total commitment and no accuracy. The host called me baby and gave me the microphone anyway. Best brand experience I had all week, and there was nothing in stock there either.