CARY, N.C. -

If you’re anything like the sports fans near Auto Remarketing’s offices in the area of North Carolina known as “Tobacco Road,”  the word “Raycom” immediately brings to mind ACC basketball.

But Raycom Media’s tentacles go well beyond the Raycom Sports property with whom sports fans are familiar, including one recent transaction — its purchase of digital ad platform PureCars in late October — that has a direct tie to the car business.

According to its website, Raycom Media either owns and/or offers services to 63 TV stations throughout the U.S., plus a few production-related companies and other work interests.

As for how PureCars fits into the fold, it will be run as a separate business unit within Raycom, meaning “the automotive dealer community that knows us as the cutting-edge leading provider in the space will continue to see that,” PureCars founder and chief executive Jeremy Anspach said in follow-up interview with Auto Remarketing this month.

Sometimes, he said, a purchased company can lose a good bit of things like “culture and speed of new product,” after an acquisition. 

Don’t count on that with this deal.

“One thing great about this acquisition is we are operating as a separate business unit,” Anspach said in the interview.  “With that being said, one of the most exciting things we see from it is the additional resources we have, both in human capital and development, as well.

“Where we’re focused is, when you look at television as a medium, it’s always stimulated shoppers to learn,” he continued.  “And before the Internet, the way they learned was, they’d go to the auto mile and start talking to dealers and test-driving cars, and then making decisions.

 “Well, as we all know, 97 percent of auto shoppers — according to the book Google wrote, '(Winning the) Zero Moment of Truth' — they don’t behave that way anymore,” Anspach said. “They’re still stimulated by TV, but then they do online learning, and what they learn online is what drives them in.”

Given that, PureCars is aiming to knock down the walls separating TV and digital, he said.

Anspach said that 87 percent of TV viewers have a second screen with them while they watch (think: scrolling through sports scores on your iPhone while you watch the football game on TV).

For PureCars, it’s about connecting the watcher to that second screen once they see the TV ad.

“When you see a commercial that stimulates you, what do you do? You probably, on that second screen, start learning,” Anspach said. “And based on what you learn, you’ll either go down the buyer funnel or you start looking at other things. 

“Or you stop looking at them altogether. So what’s exciting is, imagine seeing an incentive and when you’re on that second screen, we can connect the dots,” he added. “And by doing so, create synergy on the TV buy and also dominate on the digital side.”

More on Inventory Targeting

Less than two months after the purchase was announced, PureCars unveiled an Inventory Targeting feature that lets dealers take their daily inventory data and use it to allocate digital advertising spend.

Through this solution, which is within PureCars’ SmartAdvertising platform, dealers can view and earmark ad dollars based on the following:

— How well the inventory is merchandised
— The performance of those vehicles at their store and elsewhere in their market

So where did PureCars spot a need for this product?

“Inventory Targeting is something we’re very excited about because we have yet to see a dealership with an infinite ad budget,” Anspach said. “So, all dealers big and small have one. They have a budget. And when you have a budget, you have to make decisions.

“And the decision you have to make is, how do you spend these dollars in a way that generates the highest probability of creating more sales,” he said.

Anspach later added: “Where we see a need is, dealerships have large amounts of inventory and the inventory is not created equally as it relates to the specific vehicle. There are some vehicles on the lot that are very hot. These are vehicles high in demand with low supply. There are other vehicles that are poorly merchandised — these may be ones without quality photos or being priced away above market. Then there are vehicles where their other advertising is driving significant buyers to the vehicle details page.”

Bearing that in mind, dealers have to make decisions as to where their “finite resources” are going to be spent; they have to determine “which vehicles need a boost.”

The point is that Inventory Targeting can help dealers determine which vehicles it makes the most sense spending their ad dollars.

Another important piece of the product that PureCars emphasized was the relationship with traditional advertising.  

“You can allocate the ad spend based on their inventory and factor in merchandising, etc.,” Anspach said. “But the dealership, or their ad agency, can let us know what they’re doing in traditional, whether it’s TV, radio, billboard, etc. and we can leverage that traditional buy to create the most synergy with the digital buy.”