The modern automotive buyer journey is longer, more complex, and spans more touchpoints than ever before. With pressure to convert faster and spend smarter, marketing teams are increasingly turning to AI for solutions, and it’s shaping the future of automotive advertising.
In a recent webinar, we spoke to the experts at Phyron who shared practical insights on how AI is being used in real dealership settings to drive efficiency, improve targeting, and drive the results that matter.
The automotive sector is embracing AI, with investment set to hit $74.5 billion by 2030 – but many marketers are still cautious. As Tina Sadeghi of Phyron pointed out, only a fraction of businesses using AI feel confident in its results.
What’s missing? In short, relevant data and clear processes to enable scalable execution.
It’s becoming increasingly critical for automotive marketers to unlock this opportunity. Why? Because there’s an ever-growing pressure for teams to do more with less, counter protracted decision-making processes stemming from economic uncertainty, and adapt to greater demand for instant, high-quality digital content from car buyers.
There are lots of elements of the car buyer journey that AI can improve for both dealers and buyers. To add to that, better returns from advertising investment have the potential to drive an immediate impact for a majority of dealerships. But we’re still seeing a lot of the basics getting in the way of reaching these results.
AI can’t deliver value unless it understands your customers. Marketers who want to drive impressive results with AI need to prioritise feeding tools the information they need to develop this understanding and work at their best. There’s a need for teams to revisit their measurement processes and plug attribution gaps. In doing so, marketers can build the well-rounded data sets they need to unlock all the benefits of AI in automotive advertising.
Plugging attribution gaps isn’t just about having more data – it’s about having the right data. One of the most underused but richest sources of insight in automotive marketing is phone call data. Yet many dealerships still rely on surface-level metrics like clicks or form fills when looking at their PPC performance.
Our Director of Marketing, Matt McGillicuddy, explained that this is where Infinity’s AI-powered Smart Outcomes tool makes a massive difference. By automatically analysing inbound calls and categorising them by intent and outcome, the tool enables marketers to go far beyond basic tracking and start understanding which interactions are actually moving the needle.
“AI has made it far easier to access and use insights from customer conversations,” said Matt. “We can now analyse every call and feed the outcomes directly into optimisation platforms. It’s a game-changer for media efficiency.”
Dealerships using this rich intent data and outcome data to fuel ad optimisation are seeing a sharp increase in the volume of sales-qualified calls coming from paid media, significantly improved conversion rates, and a noticeable uplift in average order value.
For instance, Stoneacre Motor Group has seen a 79% improvement in conversion rates and 300% more sales calls coming from PPC investment by connecting call outcome data with their Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads.
“Connecting these crucial pillars of data has helped us make real commercial strides with our digital targeting.”
Mark Zavagno | Digital Operations Director, Stoneacre
Automating the flow of high-quality conversion data into platforms like Google Ads isn’t the only way AI is transforming automotive advertising. Another crucial area rapidly evolving is creative production. In a competitive landscape where attention is short and customer expectations are high, delivering relevant, dynamic content at speed is becoming a performance advantage in itself.
Tina Sadeghi of Phyron says modern car buyers are more discerning than ever. “They want personalised, on-brand, up-to-date content. And they want it now.” Without the right tools, dealerships often have to compromise on creative scope or cadence.
This is where AI’s ability to remove the manual bottlenecks associated with time-consuming elements of ad creation, like video production, is enabling dealerships to generate tailored, spec-accurate video ads for every listing on their forecourt. This significantly reduces labour and will consistently exceed buyer expectations with content that really cuts through.
By using AI in this way, Motorpoint can now create video ads 200x faster, which helps drive a significant uplift in leads. Cost-efficiencies are also a huge benefit of adopting this approach, with Jan Nygaard reporting an 88% saving on ad creative by replacing traditional car photography with AI-generated stills.
The future of automotive advertising isn’t just digital – it’s intelligent. By applying AI in ways that respect real-world buying journeys, dealership marketers can drive more value, more efficiently.
To unlock the full potential of AI, marketing teams at dealerships are enabling a shift towards outcome-driven, scalable, and automated marketing that delivers for both customers and sales teams.