• by Karl Greenberg , May 11, 2015

Television and other traditional media are still mainstays for the automobile business when it comes to regional advertising, usually by dealer groups. And although digital is going to be the growth area of the media market for car companies, after-market suppliers and other auto category players, tactics seem to focus on old-school search and classifieds. 

According to estimates by BIA/Kelsey, the automotive business will spend $15.1 billion on local advertising in 2015, representing 11.1% of the $137.9 billion total local advertising market. Of this amount, 77% is expected to be allocated to traditional media, per the firm, in its report, “Insights into Local Advertising – Automotive Vertical.” 

But BIA/Kelsey -- whose report includes auto dealers, other motor vehicle dealers, auto parts and accessory stores, tire dealers, and gas stations -- projects all growth in local advertising for the automotive vertical category will occur on online/digital media, reaching 30% of total local advertising by 2019, up from 12% in 2015.

The report estimates that 33.9% of local automotive advertising budgets is spent on over-the-air television, and another 1.7% on TV online advertising. But automakers are devoting about 14.7% of spend on newspapers; 12% to online; and 11.6% on radio.

“Despite traditional media’s dominance in the current automotive marketing mix, digital advertising is on the rise, and will represent nearly one-third of automotive local ad spending by 2019,” said the report's co-author Mark Fratrik, SVP and chief economist, BIA/Kelsey. The firm says that pure online advertising, consisting primarily of search, is the largest digital automotive channel. 

Automakers are ahead of the game on this, whether or not it's reflected at the regional level. At the Automotive news World Congress early last year, Mark LaNeve, who at that time was an executive at Ford's Team Detroit agency said Team Detroit was “digital first.” LaNeve -- who is now Ford's U.S. VP marketing -- said over half of the agency's employees work primarily on digital initiatives. He also said the nature of digital media is changing the traditional tier structure, which spoke to the way television was bought and sold.