Scroll through any dealer’s social feed right now, and you will find it. A salesperson sitting at a desk. A trending audio clip is playing in the background. An overlay that reads something like “POV: When a customer asks about their credit score,” followed by a reaction face. Maybe a few hundred views. Maybe a thousand if the algorithm felt generous that day. Almost certainly zero car deals attached to any of it.

I have been watching this trend accelerate across the industry for the past 18 months, and it is time to say what many in this business think but do not say out loud: this is a problem. Not a small one. A real, measurable, opportunity-cost problem that is quietly draining sales bandwidth at dealerships of every size and every model.

And the frustrating part is that it is happening with the best intentions. Dealers want to be relevant. They want to show personality. They want to compete on social media with content that drives engagement. None of that is wrong. The execution is wrong. The strategy behind the execution is wrong. And the metrics being used to measure success are completely disconnected from the only number that actually matters: cars sold.

We already have a perception problem, and this is making it worse

Before we get into the mechanics of bad video content, we need to talk about something the industry does not like to sit with very long.

Car dealerships are not starting from a neutral position with the general public. Consumers have been conditioned for decades to approach the car-buying experience with their guard already up. The stereotypes are baked in deep. The pushy salesperson. The four-square shuffle. The finance office feels like an interrogation room. The sense that information is being withheld and that the house always wins. Survey after survey confirms it. A significant portion of car buyers report that purchasing a vehicle ranks among the most stressful financial experiences they go through. Some consumers put it in the same emotional category as a medical procedure they did not want.

That is the starting point. That is the table stakes reality every dealership is working against before a single customer walks through the door.

Now ask yourself an honest question. When a salesperson posts a POV video mocking the way customers answer questions, or reacts with barely concealed exasperation to a trade-in expectation, or turns the friction points of the sales process into content for laughs, what exactly does that communicate to the person sitting at home who already does not trust us?

It confirms everything they already believed. It tells them that behind the professional handshake and the friendly greeting, the people at that dealership are laughing at them. It tells them their situation is a punchline. It tells them the dealership sees customers as problems to be managed rather than people to be served. Even when the intent is completely harmless, and the people making the content are genuinely good at their jobs, perception is the only thing that matters at the top of the funnel. And the perception this content creates is exactly the wrong one.

The industry has spent years trying to shed a reputation it largely earned. Mystery pricing. Pressure tactics. Long waits with no communication. Finance office products were pushed on people who did not fully understand what they were signing. The dealerships winning in the long term are the ones actively dismantling those perceptions, one customer interaction at a time. They are building reputations for transparency, speed, and treating people like adults. They are generating reviews that sound nothing like what people expect from a car dealership. And they are doing it by making every touchpoint, digital and in-person, feel like the opposite of the experience the customer feared they would have.

Skit content does not dismantle that reputation. It reinforces it.

And for dealers serving customers with credit challenges, the stakes are even higher. Those customers are not approaching your store casually. They are approaching it with a combination of hope and genuine fear. They have likely been turned down before. They may have been embarrassed before. They need to see, before they ever contact you, that your dealership leads with dignity and solutions rather than judgment. Content that reads as insider humor, even mildly, closes the door on those customers before you ever have a chance to open it.

The experience is the marketing

Here is something worth thinking about. Nobody complains about spending three hours at a dealership when those three hours were genuinely enjoyable. When the process was smooth, the people were real, the communication was consistent, and the customer felt like they were being taken care of rather than processed, three hours does not feel like three hours. Those customers walk out and tell people about it. They post about it. They send their family members back.

Three hours at a dealership that treats people right is a referral engine. Three hours at a dealership where customers sit in silence waiting for a manager who never appears, where nobody explains what is happening or why it is taking so long, where the environment feels indifferent to the fact that a real person is sitting there making a significant financial decision, feels like a root canal with no anesthesia. Those customers also tell people about it. They just tell a much larger audience, and they do not use kind words.

The point is that the experience itself is the most powerful marketing tool a dealership has, yet most conversations about digital content miss this entirely. You can run a sophisticated paid media strategy. You can have sharp pricing across every third-party platform. But if the in-store experience does not match the promise your content makes, none of it compounds as it should.

The goal is not to be tolerable. The goal is to be the dealership people brag about going to. That standard applies to every touchpoint, including what you post on social media when you think you are just having a little fun.

Your digital presence and in-store experience are not separate. They are the same brand promise at different stages of the customer journey. The tone you set in your content is the tone the customer expects when they walk in.

Content that communicates warmth, clarity, and respect produces customers who arrive with a posture that makes the whole process easier. Content that communicates you find customers mildly amusing produces customers who arrive defensive. A defensive customer is a harder deal, a lower gross, and a less likely referral. The math is not complicated.

Activity is not strategy

The first thing worth understanding is how this started. Short-form vertical video exploded as a format, and dealerships, like every other industry, started paying attention. The problem is that most dealers learned the wrong lesson from what they were watching perform well on TikTok and Instagram Reels.

What they saw was personality-driven content getting views. Humor is getting shares. Trending audio is getting reach. So they replicated the format without understanding the underlying mechanism. They tasked salespeople with making content, handed them a phone, pointed them at a trending sound, and called it a digital marketing strategy.

What they missed is that the content formats performing well on those platforms for other industries were built around entertainment with no expectation of a transaction at the end. A restaurant showing a satisfying food prep video does not need a CTA because awareness alone drives foot traffic. A clothing brand that shows a styling video benefits from the passive association between the content and the product. Those models do not translate to automotive retail, where the purchase cycle is longer, the trust barrier is higher, the transaction value is significant, and the customer arrives carrying real anxiety before they ever contact you.

Automotive is not a passive-awareness category. A customer does not stumble onto your Reel, think your reaction face was funny, and impulsively finance a vehicle on the way home. The content has to do real work. And most of what is being produced right now is not doing any work at all.

Better production does not fix a broken strategy

This is worth addressing directly because it is the next logical place dealers go when they start to recognize the problem.

The natural response to “our content is not converting” is to produce better content. Hire a videographer. Upgrade the equipment. Focus on energy, pacing, and visual presentation. And to be fair, those things matter. A video that is more watchable, more visually engaging, and more aligned with how modern short-form content actually behaves on the platform is better than a static skit filmed on a phone propped against a monitor.

But watchable is not the same as convertible. And this is where many dealerships are right now. They have improved production quality, brought the format closer to right, improved energy, tightened the pacing, and made the content feel more social-native, yet they are still not generating leads from it. Because the production improvement addressed the surface problem without touching the strategic one.

You can get the format completely right and still get the strategy completely wrong. Views are not leads. Engagement is not appointment volume. A video that performs well by social media metrics and produces zero incremental unit sales is not a marketing asset. It is an expensive distraction.

The standard for every piece of dealer video content is straightforward. Does it hook the right person immediately? Does it identify a problem they recognize in their own situation? Does it present your dealership as the solution? Does it provide proof that the solution works? Does it tell them exactly what to do next? That is the framework: hook, problem, solution, proof, call to action. Every piece of content that does not move through that sequence is leaving money on the table, regardless of how good it looks.

A dealer whose content checks every production box but skips straight from hook to entertainment, never reaching solution, proof, or action, has produced something polished and ineffective. The customer watched it, maybe even liked it, and then kept scrolling. Nothing moved.

The inward-facing problem

The single biggest issue with the content being produced at dealerships right now is that it is built for the wrong audience. The humor, the references, the POV setups, the inside jokes about job titles, credit scores, and trade-in expectations. That content resonates with people already inside the automotive industry. It does not resonate with the person who actually needs to buy a car.

Think about what your customer is actually thinking as they scroll. They are not thinking about your month-end push. They are not thinking about how relatable your finance manager is. They are thinking:

Can I get approved? What does it actually cost to get into something? Are these people going to treat me with respect or talk down to me the second I walk in? Does this dealership have what I need? What makes them different from every other place I have been?

Not one of those questions gets answered by a POV skit. Not one of those anxieties gets addressed by a reaction video. The content being produced is inward-facing. It is dealership humor dressed up as marketing. And even when the intent is completely harmless, content that treats customer situations as a setup for a punchline creates distance rather than trust. In a business where trust is the entire transaction, that is a serious miscalculation.

For customers navigating credit challenges or tight financial situations, the content calculus is even more direct. Those customers are not looking for entertainment from a dealership. They are looking for a clear answer to one question: Can you actually help me? Content that never answers that question, no matter how entertaining, is functionally invisible to the people that dealer most needs to reach.

The emotional architecture of content that converts

The content formats that consistently perform for dealers across every segment are built around transformation. Before and after. Problem and solution. Doubt and relief. Fear and confidence. The customer had been turned down elsewhere and thought they had no options left. The family that needed reliable transportation and got treated with dignity. The person who had never financed a vehicle before and walked out feeling like they made a smart decision was proud of themselves.  We should always be portraying the promise, hope, and dreams.

That is the emotional territory your video content should be occupying. That is the space where you build the kind of trust that makes someone drive past competitors to get to your lot specifically.

What is being produced instead is emotionally flat. No arc. No tension. No payoff. No moment where the viewer thinks, “That could be me,” and “that place might actually be able to help me.” Flat content accumulates views from people who were already going to scroll past you. It does not move people from passive awareness into active consideration. It does not drive appointments.

The best-performing dealer content connects to one of three emotional pillars: relief, hope, or confidence. Relief that the process is not as difficult as they feared. Hope that their situation is not as limiting as they thought. Confidence that this specific dealership knows what it is doing and will take care of them. Every piece of content you produce should be traceable back to at least one of those three. If it is not, ask why it is being made.

The opportunity cost nobody is accounting for

This is the piece that matters most from a business operations standpoint and the one almost nobody is talking about, honestly.

The time your salespeople are spending on this content is not free. Every hour spent planning a concept, filming it, reshooting because it did not look right, editing, posting, and checking the view count is an hour that did not go toward follow-up. It did not go toward the phone call to the prospect who came in on Saturday and left without buying. It did not go toward the text thread that went cold three days ago. It did not go toward the email that could have turned a one-time buyer into a repeat customer and a referral source.

Dealerships are burning real sales bandwidth on content that cannot be connected to a single unit sold, while letting warm leads go cold because nobody has time to follow up. That is not a marketing problem. That is a resource-allocation problem disguised as a marketing strategy.

A salesperson who makes ten quality, personalized follow-up attempts in the time it takes to produce one trending video will outsell that video every single time. Follow-up is not glamorous. It does not get likes. It does not show up in your engagement metrics. It shows up on your sold board, which is the only metric that was ever supposed to matter.

The hard truths nobody wants to say out loud

Every time this conversation comes up inside a dealership, the same arguments surface. They sound reasonable on the surface. They are not.

“But we are posting every single day now.”

Posting daily is not a strategy. It is a schedule. And a daily schedule filled with the wrong content does not build a brand. It dilutes one. Frequency amplifies whatever message you are already sending. If the message is off-target, posting more often means more people see content that does not represent your dealership well, but just more often. Volume without direction is not marketing momentum. It is noise at scale. The algorithm does not reward effort. It rewards relevance and retention. Twenty pieces of content per month that do not connect with in-market buyers will consistently underperform four pieces that do. Post less. Mean more.

“Some of this stuff is genuinely funny, though.”

Maybe it is. Funny is not the problem. Funny without function is the problem. Humor has a real place in dealer marketing when it is deployed strategically, when it builds warmth without creating distance, when it makes the brand more approachable without making the customer the subject of the joke. The question is never whether something is funny. The question is whether it is funny to the right person and whether it moves that person closer to buying a car from you. If the answer to either of those is no, the humor is working against you, regardless of how many laughs it generates in the break room.

“It is still better than what we were doing before.”

Better than nothing is a very low bar for a marketing investment. Six months ago, your store may have been posting nothing or posting inconsistently, and now you are posting regularly. That is a real improvement in one narrow sense. But if the content being produced still does not answer a customer’s core questions, still does not create conversion momentum, and still cannot be traced to a single unit sold, then the improvement is operational, not strategic. You graduated from doing nothing to consistently doing the wrong thing. That is not a win. It is a more organized version of the same problem.

“Our friends and family love them.”

This one is worth spending a moment on because it is the feedback loop that keeps bad content strategies alive longer than they should be. Friends and family are not your customer. They are your fan base. They will like, comment, and share almost anything you post because their relationship is with you personally, not with your brand strategically. Their engagement tells you nothing about whether an in-market buyer in your trade area, someone who does not know you, who is carrying skepticism about dealerships in general, who has real financial anxiety attached to this decision, is going to see that content and take action. The people commenting “love this” on your POV video are not the people you need to reach. Measure by the audience that matters, not the one that is already loyal to you, regardless of what you post.

Now put a number on it.

Here is the part that should make every dealer and every general manager stop and think. Assume your store produces 5 videos per week that fall into the category described throughout this article. Content that entertains without converting. Content that gets views but generates no leads, no appointments, no units. Let us be conservative about the costs.

A salesperson or social media coordinator spending 2 hours per video, at a fully loaded labor cost of around $25 per hour, represents $250 per week in direct labor just for production time. That is roughly $1,000 per month in people costs for content that is not working.

But those two hours do not include everything that happened before the camera came out. It does not include the 30 minutes spent scrolling through other dealerships’ feeds looking for inspiration. It does not include the time spent on TikTok or Instagram watching what other stores are doing and trying to reverse-engineer what made something perform. It does not include the conversation with a coworker about what the next concept should be, or the 45 minutes spent prompting an AI tool trying to generate video ideas for next week’s content calendar. Add that research and ideation time, and the real per-video investment is closer to three to four hours per piece. At five videos per week, you are now looking at 15 to 20 hours of combined staff time every single week going toward content that does not move a unit.  Now we are up to a minimum of $2,000 in wasted labor costs per month.

Now consider what that same time could have produced. Those same AI tools being used to brainstorm video concepts could be pointed directly at the CRM. A salesperson with a stuck deal, a prospect who went cold after a lot of visits (web, social phone, and/or lot), a lead who submitted an inquiry three weeks ago and has not responded since, can bring that customer’s situation to an AI tool and get specific, personalized follow-up language in under five minutes. Subject lines, text messages, voicemail scripts, and email sequences tailored to where that customer is in the process and the objection they are likely to have. That is not a theoretical use case. That is a practical, available capability that almost no dealership floor is taking advantage of because the same people who could be using it are busy watching competitor videos for content ideas.

The same logic applies to training. If a salesperson genuinely has two hours of available time in a given week, that time spent on a targeted sales training video, one focused on objection handling, on financing conversations, on how to re-engage a cold lead, compounds in every deal they work for the rest of their career. The content they would have produced in those two hours disappears from the algorithm in 48 hours. The skill they build in those two hours does not.

The real cost is not just in the production. It is in the follow-ups that did not happen, the training that did not get done, the stuck deals that stayed stuck, and the CRM contacts that aged out because nobody had bandwidth to work them properly. At an average gross of 2,500 dollars per unit, recovering even one additional deal per month from redirected time and attention represents gross profit the current content strategy is actively costing you. Every single month. Multiply that across a year, and you are looking at $30,000 or more in missed gross opportunity at a single-point store, not from doing nothing, but from doing the wrong thing with time and resources that should have been going toward closing business already in the pipeline.

That is not a content problem. That is a business problem with a content cause.

The revolving door makes it worse

There is one more risk that almost nobody factors into this conversation, and it compounds everything already discussed.

Automotive retail has one of the highest employee turnover rates of any industry in the country. The average dealership salesperson tenure is measured in months, not years. That reality sits at the center of a content strategy built around individual personalities, and it creates a problem that does not resolve itself cleanly.

When a salesperson who has become the face of your social content leaves, and statistically they will leave, every video they appeared in becomes a liability. The content does not disappear automatically. It sits on your feed, sometimes for months or years, depending on how diligently someone manages the account. Customers who saw that person in a video and expected to work with them walk in and find out they are gone. That creates friction before the conversation even starts. Customers who are doing their research before visiting, which is nearly everyone now, may encounter that content, feel a connection to the person they see, and then discover upon arrival that the experience they anticipated does not exist. That is a trust problem created entirely by content strategy.

If that salesperson moves to a competing dealership in the same market, the situation gets significantly more complicated. Now there is content on your feed featuring someone who is actively selling for a competitor. Their face is associated with your brand in the social algorithm’s memory even after you delete the posts, because the engagement history does not erase. Customers who follow both stores may make the connection. The person themselves may reference their previous content in their new role. None of that is hypothetical. It happens regularly, and it happens because nobody thought through the long-term brand implications of building content around individuals with no employment guarantee.

There is also a legitimate concern about digital footprint beyond social media. Video content featuring specific individuals, when it lives on a website or gets indexed by search engines, can create confusing attribution signals. A salesperson who appeared in inventory walkarounds or testimonial-style content tied to your dealership’s domain continues to exist in search results even after deletion from the original source. Cached pages, embedded shares, third-party aggregators, and social platform archives all have their own retention behaviors. The content you thought you removed may still be surfacing in ways you cannot fully control, now associated with someone who no longer represents your store or who actively represents a competitor.

The solution is not to avoid putting people on camera. Authentic human presence in dealer content is genuinely valuable. The solution is to build content around the brand, the process, the customer experience, and the outcomes your dealership consistently produces, rather than around the personality of any individual employee. Customers, delivery moments, inventory, your facility, your team in action, your approval process, your service experience. Those assets do not resign and take a job across town. They do not create confusion when a new hire cannot find the person they saw in a video. They compound over time instead of creating liability.

Content built around your brand survives turnover. Content built around your people does not.

What video should actually be doing

None of this is an argument against video. Video is one of the most powerful tools available to a dealership right now. The argument is against a video without a job description.

Every piece of video content your store produces should have a clear answer to one question: what is this supposed to make someone do? If the answer is laugh, or relate, or think we seem fun, that is not a job description. That is a hope. And hopes do not fill a CRM with qualified leads.

Here is what a video with a real job description looks like.

A personalized follow-up video is one of the highest-converting tools in automotive retail right now, yet almost nobody is using it at scale. A 30 to 45-second video from a salesperson to a prospect who visited and did not buy, referencing the specific vehicle they looked at and the conversation they had, giving them a genuine reason to come back. That is personal. That is specific. That is something a templated text cannot replicate. It converts at a significantly higher rate than any other follow-up format when it is done consistently. That is the video your salespeople should be making. Not a trending skit. A targeted, personal message to a real person who is already partway down the funnel.

Trust-building content built around real customer outcomes does the work no skit ever could. An approval story. A delivery moment. A customer speaking in their own words about the experience. These formats answer the question every prospect is silently asking before they decide where to shop: has someone like me done this here before, and did it work out? That question, answered consistently and authentically across your channels, is worth more than a thousand reaction videos.

Objection-handling content is an underused format that performs exceptionally well for dealers willing to be direct about it. What is the most common reason people do not buy from your store? Put it on camera and address it. If people think the process takes too long, show them the process. If people think they need perfect credit, tell them clearly and specifically that they do not and show them why. If people are not sure what to expect when they walk in, walk them through it before they ever arrive. That kind of content builds credibility before the first contact and shortens the sales cycle.

Inventory-specific walkarounds with real pricing and payment context, targeted to in-market audiences through paid placement, will outperform trending organic content on a cost-per-lead basis every single time. A well-produced walkaround of a specific vehicle, priced right, with payment information included, in front of the right audience, is a lead generation tool. It has a job. It does the job. Treat it like the asset it is.

The bottom line

Video is not the problem. Undisciplined video is the problem. When content creation becomes a daily activity without a conversion objective attached to it, you are spending real time and real money for metrics that will never show up on a sold board.

But the deeper issue runs underneath all of it. This industry is still fighting for basic consumer trust and has been for a long time. Every piece of content your dealership puts into the world is either building that trust or eroding it. There is no neutral. There is no post that exists in a vacuum, separate from your brand and separate from the reputation you are either earning or losing with every customer who encounters you online before they ever set foot on your lot.

The dealerships that win the next five years are not going to be the ones with the most views. They are going to be the ones that figured out how to make every customer touchpoint feel like the opposite of what consumers have always feared about buying a car. Every social post. Every follow-up call. Every minute someone spends on their lot. That consistency is what earns loyalty. That is what generates referrals. That is what turns a transaction into a relationship and a relationship into a business that does not need to chase new customers because the existing ones keep sending them.

Everything else is just noise with a ring light.

Terry MacCauley is the founder and CEO of Big Time Advertising + Marketing, a full-service automotive digital advertising agency based in Chesterfield, Mo., serving independent, BHPH, and franchise dealerships nationwide. The firm’s website is at https://gowithbigtime.com/ and this article originally was published here.