[NADA Series] Optimizing Amazon Advertising for Dealerships With Vasilios Lambos

Vasilios Lambos is the Co-founder and CMO of CognitionDigital.io, a company that provides tools and products to help businesses build campaigns on Amazon advertising. CognitionDigital.io is an Amazon Ads Verified Partner serving advertisers in the retail, automotive, healthcare, and other industries. Vasilios’ experience in the automotive space includes serving as the Senior Digital Marketing Specialist at Hendrick Automotive Group and an Associate at Red Ventures’ automotive department.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Vasilios Lambos’ experience at the NADA conference
• CognitionDigital.io’s ideal clients
• How Vasilios educates dealers about Amazon advertising
• The value of collaborations in the automotive space

In this episode…

What are the best online marketing strategies for dealers? How can you use e-commerce to scale your business?

The Amazon Ads platform provides great opportunities for dealers to reach new audiences, measure success, and scale their businesses. With the right advertising strategy, dealers can leverage Amazon to target a diverse customer base and maximize sales.

In this episode of the InsideAuto Podcast, Ilana Shabtay interviews Vasilios Lambos, the Co-founder and CMO of CognitionDigital.io, about providing Amazon advertising services to dealers. They also discuss the benefits of collaborations in the automotive space and how Vasilios educates businesses about Amazon Ads.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• AutoLeadStar
• Ilana Shabtay on LinkedIn
• CognitionDigital.io
• Vasilios Lambos on LinkedIn
• Carson Henry on LinkedIn
• Hendrick Automotive Group
• Red Ventures

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by AutoLeadStar, a company that helps car dealerships engage quality customers on the web and convert them into car buyers.

Co-founded by Aharon Horwitz, Yishai Goldstein, and Eliav Moshe, AutoLeadStar’s state-of-the-art software automates a dealership’s entire marketing funnel and provides around-the-clock service for dealers.

AutoLeadStar’s innovative technology helps dealerships automate ads, connect with customers, and discover ROI and performance metrics.

Visit their website at www.autoleadstar.com to learn more about their around-the-clock marketing service.

Episode transcript:

Intro 0:03

Welcome to InsideAuto Podcast where we feature everyone and anyone you’d want to talk to you in and out of the automotive industry.

Ilana Shabtay 0:13

Awesome. I am here with Vasilios Lambos, CMO and Co-founder at Cognition Digital.

Vasilios Lambos 0:19

That’s correct. How are you doing? Fantastic.

Ilana Shabtay 0:22

Yeah. Welcome to InsideAuto Podcast.

Vasilios Lambos 0:24

Thank you for having me.

Ilana Shabtay 0:25

How’s the show going for you?

Vasilios Lambos 0:27

Oh, it’s fantastic. Yeah. Very excited about the collaboration amongst all the marketing vendors, you feel it? Definitely the CDP providers in the space like there’s been an interesting energy this year.

Ilana Shabtay 0:45

Yeah, I definitely feel that I’ve been stopped a few times being like, Hey, we should talk with our data. We start with our integration. I think 2023 will probably be the year for that. Yeah, it’s

Vasilios Lambos 0:55

gonna be big. It’s gonna be big.

Ilana Shabtay 0:57

And so are you guys have a booth here?

Vasilios Lambos 1:00

No, we don’t have a booth. Okay. We’re kind of in that unique space of agencies use our platform to access Amazon advertising. Yeah, we provide tools and products to help those agencies scale. So it’s a bad look, you know, to have a booth next to your client.

Ilana Shabtay 1:16

So yeah, for sure. You guys are really doing well in that space. It’s been

Vasilios Lambos 1:21

fun. Yeah, a lot, a lot of opportunities to help dealers, expand their media plan, measure matchback attribution program programmatically, which has been a difficult process traditionally, for people who are buying media on a DSP, because a lot of those components tend to be in different silos. And we’re sort of bringing that together, making it streamlined and easier to execute.

Ilana Shabtay 1:48

And that’s solely for the Amazon ads.

Vasilios Lambos 1:51

Yeah, we only work with Amazon ads. We’re the only automotive verified partner. Yes. Working with Amazon. And Amazon has also invested in us. So they help us, you know, provide us direction so that we know where to build, but also give them customer feedback. Because, you know, we would be nothing if we weren’t asking questions of our customers, and having them provide feedback to develop to.

Ilana Shabtay 2:16

Yeah, I think I think that’s great. Congratulations on the investment. Do you feel like there’s enough education in the space? When it comes to this? I know, this is something that you’re prioritizing, but But I see. You know, I learned a lot about the Amazon for dealers through you guys. But do you feel like there’s education? Dealers are prioritizing this? They’re thinking about it?

Vasilios Lambos 2:36

I’ll be very honest. No, we like honesty. And we’re very transparent company. Yeah. I think one asset that we have is our people. And we’re very immersed in automotive mainly because we’re auto retail guys at heart. I mean, I came from Hetrick market, Hendrick Automotive marketing department, prior to that, worked very closely in the auto space at Red Ventures, when we’re evaluating new business models, my partner, Carson Henry, our CEO, here, he’s not, but he also worked at Hendrick. And so we understand the business very, very well. And we understand that dealers in particular, their marketing departments are highly fragmented, that however, that fragmentation, I think, can be remedied by taking those teams, putting them in the same room, and making sure that we educate them a lot on how the technology works, where those audiences live, and ultimately how to measure success. Yeah. So it’s early. The beauty is, it’s early, that’s great. You want to, you know, net new channel that’s going to deliver results. There’s Amazon, there’s a bunch of other players in the space that are pursuing, you know, the apple, you know, there’s this Google Facebook, domination, that sort of slowly crippling before our eyes. And I think dealers are becoming smarter. If COVID taught them anything, it was, you know, spend less, do more, be more diligent with where you’re making your investments. And fortunately for us, this is gonna be a big year for media. Yeah. Right, because interest rates are up, and dealers are gonna have to move inventory a lot quicker than what they did in the last two years. And so we’re, we’re waiting for that growth.

Ilana Shabtay 4:23

Yeah, I think, I think also what you said, is very accurate when you talk about how you know what the dealers learned from COVID. I think one more thing I’ll add to that is just to be super dynamic. And you can only do that if you’re familiar with every single outlet and you’re really educating yourself and for dealers that are not familiar they should get recognition digital Dido I think it’s important I think what you guys are doing really great.

Vasilios Lambos 4:50

Yeah, we we love the collaboration. I you know, I would say the biggest advantage we have as a business today is that we we say we don’t have competitors, because we drive our own lane with our ad agency partners. And we’re creating co marketing opportunities for their clients to go out there and educate. And I think our investment in our people to spend time with, Hey, we’re not just selling ad space, we’re not just selling a product here, right, we’ll actually set up a call and we’ll walk you through the nitty gritty, you know, how the impression is measured what view through attribution means. And there’s a lot of nomenclature out there buzzwords that sort of plague the automotive industry. And we’re simplifying it, right? We’re telling them listen, you know, CDP clean rooms, there’s five different ways you could talk about a data warehouse, and how you use that data is going to be the most important. And I would say, you know, auto Leafstar does a phenomenal job of packaging that making it easier to understand. Yeah, and so we’re, we’re looking forward to seeing that evolve, because our company is a cleanroom. We match back attribution, but we use the cleanroom to find ways to make that data more value valuable, whether it’s third party, first party, you name it, so we’re excited to learn, but it’s gonna take the industry, I think, a couple of years to not only understand the space, but really learn it.

Ilana Shabtay 6:18

Yeah. And I think there’s also going to be a huge emphasis on data strategy. I’m hearing a lot about it. We just talked about it in the previous podcast, dealers that don’t have a dealer strategy should really focus on that, so that they can create that environment to query their data, understand what’s working, understanding what’s not, whether that’s Amazon or something else. So excited to see that, you know, coming out this year. Yeah, we’re pumped. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us on InsideAuto Podcast.

Vasilios Lambos 6:44

Anytime. Thanks for having me.

Outro 6:49

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