LAS VEGAS — At the 20024 Digital Dealer Conference and Expo, the inaugural 2024 Digital Dealer Best of Awards were handed out. The five awards were delivered to those who exemplified the best in the auto industry.
In winning the Impact Award, Brad Paschal, market president of Dynatron Software was cited for his work this June when a ransomware attack affected dealers across the U.S.
A nominee stated that as a result of the cyberattacks that hampered dealers operations earlier this year, “we were in shambles. Brad went out of his way and provided our dealership with an arsenal of excel forms and other pertinent fixed operation documents to keep our business in order. Top notch service from day one!”
Paschal Comments
Another offered “I talked with several dealers that said they wouldn’t have been able to operate as well as they were able to without Brad’s help. This guy loves auto, he’s smart, and, most importantly, he cares about the dealers he works with.”
Accepting his award in Las Vegas, Paschal said he was truly honored to receive the Impact Award for helping dealers this year at a point they were scrambling for answers.
“My teammate Anthony Fletcher and I decided to see how we could help out,” said Paschal. “He actually came up with the idea for the manual service and sales forms. I just aggregated and simplified them. We were able to get those form in the hands of 900 plus dealers.”
“Its all in our efforts to be the best partner that we can be to our dealers and to give back to the industry that has given us so much.”
AMG Wins Marketing Award
Cited for “taking the headache and hassle away from GMs by not only leading vendors to be the best they can be for their dealer partners, but ensuring execution,” the Best Marketing Award was bestowed on Automotive Marketing Gurus (AMG), led by CEO Jonathan Thompson.
AMG was characterized by a nominee as filling “a void that our organization sorely needed. Their team of specialists work tirelessly to aid dealership operations in any and all ways imaginable. In our three year relationship, they’ve never once told me ‘no.’ I’d recommend AMG to any and all dealers.”
Thompson, nominated along with AMG’s Anthony Morales and Alicia Brooks, said “this recognition reflects our unwavering commitment to not only provide efficient and effective marketing consulting and collaboration that drives measurable results, but also to enhancing the experience for both our automotive professionals and retail shoppers. We believe that a strong focus on people, process, and experience is what truly makes a difference in today’s competitive market. Thank you to Digital Dealer and to all of our partners who trust us to help shape their success.”
Best New Product Goes to Affinitiv
Affinitiv‘s Activator Suite, a product that helps dealers maintain and grow website traffic when cookies go away, was named best new product. Using a three-pronged approach, the Activator Suite is an audience aggregator solution that supports and leverages a dealer’s third-party partnerships to enable retargeting in compliance with new data protection laws.
Delivering over an 85 percent ID matchback rate, the Activator suite collectively gathers pertinent website visitor details, including name, address, email, age range, and car data, as well as vehicles and pages viewed. Once the audiences are captured, the program engages service-ready owners, trade-in prospects, and in-market shoppers with multi-channel campaigns via email, social media (Facebook and Instagram), over-the-top (OTT) ads, and Google, as defined by the dealer. It helps to streamline a dealership’s digital marketing efforts with highly targeted, highly relevant campaigns, potentially reducing overall digital marketing costs.
In accepting the award for the company, Affinitiv’s Michael Smith noted the value the experience and connections the company builds every year at Digital Dealer expos.
“We are extremely proud of our Activator Suite and its performance as it contains some of the most exclusive live first party data in the automotive industry,” said Smith. “Our exclusive low funnel data can exponentially increase dealership’s consumer base with high-quality, high-engagement, high-converting traffic, increasing their overall sales and service volume and profitability.”
Best Use of AI Winner
Lotlinx Sentinel was chosen for the 2024 Best Use of AI. Lotlinx was honored for its AI-powered data technology tools playing a key role in modern inventory management and pricing strategies.
Sentinel is a SaaS-based vehicle risk mitigation platform powered by AI that protects dealers by forecasting risks and implementing targeted corrective actions at the VIN level to reduce the time vehicles spend on lots, eraning higher profit margins and enhance competitive market performance.
Powered by Lexaca, company officials promote Sentinel as the most advanced machine learning, AI and data mining technologies to monitor a proprietary data set of real-time market factors that drive VIN outcomes. Sentinel automatically allocates the right amount of advertising to drive high quality buyers to vehicle detail pages, leading to selling cars 7-10 days faster and earning on average $350 additional on each transaction.
Liza Myers Borches is 2024 Dealer of the Year
Liza Myers Borches, President, Carter Myers Automotive (CMA), took home the Best Dealer Award.
One nominee said Myers Borches and CMA “have shown on multiple fronts why they are the best automotive group, from innovation, culture, to growth. One of the best in the business.”
In 2011, CMA’s board of directors elected Myers Borches as company president and in 2012, she became chief executive officer. She is the fourth generation of her family to lead the company and CMA has more than doubled in size under her leadership.
Before that, Myers Borches worked for American Honda for seven years as a regional sales manager before joining the family business. CMA purchased a Volvo franchise in 2003 and was named president and general manager of Volvo Cars of Charlottesville in February 2004.