Driving showroom visits for an automotive brand
We turned an automotive media budget into measurable showroom visits, planned around the in-market buyer, run as one connected campaign, and measured through to footfall.
Foot traffic is the hardest outcome in the funnel to influence with digital media, and the hardest to prove. For this automotive brand, the dealership showroom visit was the moment that mattered, so we built the whole programme to drive and measure it.
The challenge
Car buyers do not research in one place. A single shopper might discover a model on connected TV, hear an audio spot on the commute, compare specs on mobile, then walk into a dealership two weeks later. When each channel is bought and measured in isolation, you over-pay for reach, double-serve the same person, and lose the thread between exposure and action.
What we did
We planned around the in-market buyer and ran every channel as one connected campaign:
- First-party data, not demographics. Historical owner records were onboarded into a privacy-safe identity framework and modelled into lookalike audiences of in-market intenders.
- Behavioural personas. We segmented by media behaviour and sequenced channels in the order each persona actually uses them, rather than buying a broad age bracket.
- One connected buy. CTV, audio, display, native and digital out-of-home activated through a single platform, with cross-device frequency control so one buyer was not treated as three.
- Footfall measurement. Exposed audiences were linked to real dealership visits against a control group, and budget was reallocated in-flight toward the channel paths that drove visits.
The results
Within six weeks of launch, measured against a control group, showroom visits among the exposed audience rose while the cost and time to drive them fell sharply. A standout from the conversion-path analysis: when audio and display appeared together in a buyer’s journey, average time to conversion dropped by around 45 per cent. That is the kind of finding you can only act on when every channel is measured as one system.
Why it worked
A smaller, sharper spend, planned around real buyers and measured to a real-world outcome, consistently outperformed broad reach. That is the BiND model: connected media and unified data, measured to the number that actually matters.