Welcome to Day 2 of AM Innovation Week 2026, where today’s focus turns to innovation in dealership marketing.
Technology gives retailers more opportunities than ever to identify, reach and respond to individual customers. But access to more data, channels and automation does not necessarily guarantee better marketing.
Today, AM asks how dealers can deliver genuine personalisation at scale without overwhelming customers, intruding on their privacy or allowing valuable conversations to disappear between disconnected systems.
We also examine whether retailers are measuring what really matters. Clicks, impressions and enquiry volumes can make a campaign look successful, but dealerships ultimately need to know which activity generates showroom visits, vehicle sales and aftersales bookings.
In our first feature, Sean Keywood explores how dealerships are using technology to tailor vehicle recommendations, finance messages, service reminders and follow-up activity.
The foundations remain vital. Personalised marketing is only as reliable as the information underpinning it, yet customer data is often inaccurate or spread across manufacturer and retailer systems – and sometimes still held in notebooks. Applying AI to fragmented or unreliable information risks amplifying those weaknesses.
Today’s coverage also considers how quickly dealerships should respond to enquiries and when an automated conversation should pass to a person. The emerging principle is a useful one: AI should handle information, while people handle judgement.
In our second feature, Alex Wright asks how dealers can move beyond clicks and leads to prove which marketing activity sells cars.
CitNOW Group says customers who book a test drive are 70% more likely to convert, while those who watch a video are 21% more likely while Autotrader’s Buying Signals programme has now enriched more than one million enquiries.
But closing the attribution gap requires marketing platforms, CRM systems and dealer management systems to exchange information. Without that connectivity, linking campaign spending to sales revenue remains largely guesswork.
Our video content broadens the discussion further. Nexbotix chief executive Chris Porter explains how dealers can use automation to eliminate the “human bridges” manually connecting back-office systems and eroding the margin secured in the showroom.
In our Executive View, Cazoo chief marketing officer Lucy Tugby discusses the thinking behind its Honestly, Finally campaign, including its category-challenging creative approach and use of hybrid AI to help build trust among car buyers.
The practical test running through all today’s coverage is whether innovation makes marketing more relevant for the customer and more commercially accountable for the retailer.
That question will be explored further during AM’s free webinar, Identifying the innovations that count, at 2pm on Thursday, 24 September.
Reserve your place for the AM Innovation Week webinar now and follow AM throughout Innovation Week as we examine innovation in marketing, sales, aftersales and dealership culture.