SEMA Strategy, Marketing Budgets & AI's Impact on the Automotive Industry

Transcript

right folks, welcome back to the Automotive Advantage. Good to see you. Thanks for choosing to spend some time with us. I’m Jamie Meyer. This is Justin Sessler. We are in the Drive Line Studios podcast studio in Pontiac, Michigan. Give us a little bit of time. We’re going to give you an unfair advantage in the automotive industry and automotive aftermarket industry. We’re going to be running through a bunch of stuff today. We do have a market index today. Justin, compliments of our friends at MidwayPlus.com. And then there’s a bunch of media stuff going on. The whole industry is getting ready for the SEMA show, which is great.

Justin, first of all, I want to check in on you. How are you today? How are you feeling? I’m doing great. I did forget to record on your entire intro there, but it saves to this thing as well. It was probably your best intro so far. You didn’t save it over there? No. It saved here. If the people at home heard your intro, we’ve managed to save it through redundant technology. If not, we had a really good intro today. Sorry about that, everybody.

It is SEMA crunch time. It feels like everything has come down to the wire as it always does. Every single year, every single SEMA. I know we have a lot to talk about today. I’m interested to know where we are at with the MidwayPlus market index. Since we unveiled it, it feels like we’re down. But I would have no way of knowing that other than just the straight up vibes. Are we starting there or are we starting with the big news on the board behind me?

I think we should celebrate and say thank you. We have a thousand subscribers to our YouTube channel. Thank you. Yeah, this is incredible. We’ve talked about how much one subscriber matters to us. That sounds like a thing that people say that they don’t really mean. Literally, every time we get feedback, one to one feedback from one person, two people. From five people, it feels like the whole world is giving us feedback. A thousand subscribers on YouTube is incredible.

Thank you, everybody who’s listening. We also have 150 on Spotify. Super cool if you’re listening to this audio only on Spotify. Thank you. I would say we could ask people to share, but honestly they’ve done so much already. By commenting, which has been wonderful. By subscribing, which has been wonderful. By replying to our text messages, asking for feedback from everybody. Which really does help us shape the show a lot. I thought it would take, I guess to me it didn’t matter how long it took to get to a thousand subs. Because we’re just going to keep going no matter what. But it’s been super cool that we’re there so quickly. What’s your vibe on our 1K hit here?

It’s a huge milestone for us. You just said it, but the quality of the folks that are listening to us and our guests that have come on. Is incredible. We’ve got small business folks. We’ve got young people that are starting their careers. They’ve never had content like this before. That makes me feel so good. We’ve got a lot of finance folks that are watching this thing. A lot of private equity groups are checking in. You and I both get feedback every week from people that are texting us directly. That don’t want other people to know that they’re listening to this.

It’s been a lot of fun to grow this thing and extend our network to you folks. We’re going to keep going. Get us a note, get us a comment. We appreciate it. It does change who we bring on here. We’ve got some awesome guests lined up. I think when folks see this, the Nicki Fowler interview will have just come out. Nicki was spectacular. It was an awesome, we say master class. Probably too much on social channels as an industry. Nicki really gave a master class on buying parts, selling parts, marketing parts, behind the scenes with OEMs. It was really good.

We did have a guest lined up for today who called in sick. We’ve got Isaac Baker from Finishing Touch Auto Spa coming on next. We’ll talk about what’s going to happen next week. That will be one of our next guests. Keith Wilson stopped by. We’ve got some awesome folks lined up that are going to keep this thing churning. If you want to get on, let us know. If you have a request that you would like to hear from someone, let us know. We’ve been really lucky to have some awesome guests right out the gate. Every single one of them has been more insightful and more impactful than I think we could have hoped for. Nicki’s was an incredible look at someone who’s literally spent almost 50 years in a single dealership. Cracking the dealership code is impossible. Even the OEs don’t really know how the dealership operates. Consumers definitely don’t know how the dealership operates. That was huge. Keith’s is going to be a super good look at events and how a dealership group can go direct to the customer, which is super cool. The whole backlog, I’ve been listening to some of the older ones. There’s so much good knowledge here. It’s been really cool.

Give us some feedback. We’d love to hear Let’s start helping folks out there with a tip on news around the SEMA show. I would say the traditional way, which still can be effective, is you’ve got a new product, you’ve got a cool car, you’ve got a change in the business, and you want to make people aware of it at SEMA. Fourth quarter makes sense. It likely isn’t going to impact your fourth quarter, but it’s going to affect the following year.

Justin, we’re starting to see people drop news, share new products. I see Mopar’s out early with some of their project cars. The Dude truck showed up. I saw that today on some of my social feed. When we were at Chevrolet Performance and we were launching new performance parts and we were launching new vehicles, we launched early. The lesson was, hey, by the time you get to Tuesday of SEMA, the news is out there. There is fatigue in the market at some point during the week of SEMA, so we just started front-loading everything at Chevy. We’d hold a little bit back for the day of, and we should tell people, it takes about a week to ship cars from Detroit to Las Vegas, so we would launch two weeks early. We’d have an event in Detroit, bring a bunch of media in that were very responsive. That would go out. We’d give an embargo on some stuff.

For many years, I spearheaded the Chevy Performance Media event. You and the 110 Agency helped me a bunch there. We would have media folks at Spring Mountain, which was right there 45 minutes from Vegas, on Saturday, Sunday, and then we’d have to wrap everything up, head downtown, do a Monday night reveal. Tuesday, we would do something on the Chevy display. By that time, it was just complete chaos and everybody was exhausted. We aren’t going to do a podcast. We aren’t going to publish a podcast next week for the same reason. There’s already so much news.

I think I got the blueprint out there, but add in where you think I missed anything. Yeah, we like graphs now on this. Here’s my SEMA engagement chart. This is Sunday here. We’re up here. Literally, by midday Tuesday, this thing just starts to come straight down. By Wednesday, you may even be trending lower than this. By Thursday, if your news is not out or if you’re planning on releasing it on Thursday, literally no one in the world is going to engage with it. So, Sunday, two Sundays, the Sunday we just had before, that’s great peak news time for me.

Monday, let’s just call this the day before, whatever event you’re going to, another big day because people are like, “What’s going to be in there? I want to know about it.” Tuesday, or the day that the show opens, obviously big day, but now you’re competing with everyone else on planet Earth. Then, either people are now inside the show and are no longer checking their phone for any of this news, or they’re not at the show and they’re like, “Cool dude, I get it. I already saw what I wanted to see. I’m upset that I’m not at the show. I’m going to stop engaging with these things.” We see this across industries. We see it in automotive. We see it in the firearms world. Other shows that we support.

Yes, going out early and often is definitely what we would recommend to people. I honestly don’t even think you can go too early. I’m surprised people don’t launch a month out, three weeks out, two weeks out. Now, we’re starting to see, like you said, Dodge just did. But yeah, go early. So, if you’re listening to this, you still have a couple days before SEMA kicks off. Maybe just hit Send. Maybe stop what you’re doing right now on YouTube and just hit Send.

The other thing that I didn’t know when I was younger and in the media space is, if you’re getting to the show on opening day, everyone else has already done all of it. They’ve already probably driven the cars, seen the cars, done the photo shoots, done the like. You’re way behind here. So, if you’re going to try to break news for your audience on Tuesday, you got to come with a very different angle. By the time the press releases hit, the media’s already had them for a week. They’ve already written their stories. They might have spent time with engineers or different people. They might have got early copies of stuff. So, their stuff is going to drop at the embargo. If you’re walking into the show floor and you see something cool, there’s definitely time. But don’t film it and then be like, “Oh, I’m going to drop that video on Thursday because you’re so late then.” It’s wild.

Just explain to me what an embargo is for the folks that are just tuning into this concept, just to cover off on that. An embargo is a time at which you are allowed to publish news about a thing, basically. Let’s say a car company is coming out with a new car at SEMA. They will tell you, “Hey, you cannot publish this story until 7.30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, November 2nd.” Whatever that day is. If you go at 7.28, you’re in trouble. If you go at 7.30 the night before because you mixed up your a.m. and p.m., you’re in trouble. If you go at 10.30 because you missed the 7.30 thing, you’re in trouble because the news is already out there.

An embargo is super important to respect and maintain. I’m telling you the a.m. and p.m. thing because I’ve seen it. I’m telling you about the date thing because sometimes websites have to go live early and it can turn into a total disaster. If you’re a brand, an embargo is good because everyone’s getting that information out at the same time. But if you’re a content creator, an embargo is bad because you’re now competing with everyone to get the news out there. So, again, similar to what I said earlier, I guess. If you’re going to make content around a show like this, give it a fresh perspective. Don’t just regurgitate the press release because everyone’s already read that and you’re late on it. So, yeah, I think the timing is very interesting. We talked about it. We released these on Thursdays, which remember the chart, worst day possible in the cycle to release something. Our entire audience is going to be on the road or traveling or at an event during that time period. So, something to think about and then think about other shows like this. PRI, SHOT Show, if you’re in the firearms industry, HPX, Auto Shows, CES, NAB, whatever, think through this timing. I think you and I have accidentally released on some other big show date before and been like, “Oh, we missed it.” Yeah,

really good. That’s perfect. I think earlier is better. The other thing we should explain is that manufacturers can make their own event. I think some people would pause and say, “Oh, that’s really expensive.” I don’t mean host a bunch of media influencers, however you want to refer to people that help you get your news out, but you can do it online. You can simply drop some great content, watch the other shows. Now, there could be people that just decide, “Hey, there’s enough of us that aren’t going to that show. I’m going to put it out on top of the show and let it roll.”

But what you described is kind of the traditional path, some guidelines, but you can also kind of make your own up. And today, it’s easier than ever. Yeah, 100%. I love the idea of making your own event. Like you said, we used to do a Chevy all the time. It worked great. There was a media event in Detroit. Then there was a media event at Spring Mountain. And then there was the Monday night before. And you just get way more time talking to the media and partners and influencers and dealers and whoever you need to talk to. But you don’t have to go that crazy. I mean, Westbuck famously has a party at PRI that is a great place to be. It does wonders for their brand.

You can just do a dinner. You can just do, “Hey, everyone, let’s show up and go cruise.” There’s a bunch of options that aren’t super expensive. But everybody likes getting a little inside scoop. Everyone likes spending some time with your brand. So, yeah, something to think about around every event. There’s a plug for HPX, honestly. The Charlotte area is so underutilized for this. And I’m waiting to see shops and brands start to be like, “Oh, there’s cool rooftop bars. There’s cool things to do down here.” That was some of our excitement the first time we went. So, yeah, you don’t have to rent a racetrack and build 50 cars for it. You could just unveil a car in front of a restaurant. You could just have people look at your product on a rooftop. I mean, there’s a lot of cool stuff to do there. And maybe for C-Mets a little late, but for PRI, SHOT Show, Auto Shows, HPX, there’s plenty of time to put one of those plans together.

We’ve got our agenda. We’ve got the index next, but maybe we should go to the events discussion or media. And let’s go to the media one, because I think some of what you’re dovetailing into for me is traditional media right now is just all over the place. Print is holding on. We had Galimian who explained about a lot of what’s going on there. There’s still digital elements that are just, I would say, traditional stuff that we’ve just seen in the last seven days have been uprooted. And they’re major players that are getting pushed aside.

Back to the media thing, you have people with an iPhone. You have people that are streaming stuff. You can just go live, and you can have a crowd of just people that can be extremely effective. One of the observations that came our way this week is, you know, man, there just aren’t a bunch of grassroots reporters or photographers out there anymore. And you and I both grew up in this industry going to events. And I’ll really date myself and say my first, I would say, job in the industry was with Bill Alexander at Fun Forward Weekend. I would announce, I would go take pictures, I would run some stories on Five-O Mustang Magazine, the print one with Steve Turner. You grew up with GM high-tech, but you and I spent a lot of time saying I’m the starting line of the drag strip, taking pictures. And, you know, it’s kind of dawned on us. There aren’t a lot of those photographers left anymore. So you went further that path than I had. But where have all the photographers gone that are covering this industry? Are they just gobbled up and I see them as influencers and other forms?

But Woody, I know this is really near and dear to your heart, but where have these guys gone? Photos had a rough decade, I think. There’s a joke in the photo industry that photographers started undercutting each other the second the second camera came out. So it’s kind of always been a dying art form. Like literally they made the first camera, the second I came out, you charge less. It’s just pinned downhill from there. So I think you have a pricing structure that’s hard to deal with now. I think Instagram used to be a photo app and then it became a video app. And then people just don’t need photos as much as they need video content. So it’s been harder and harder for photographers.

Obviously, if you’re a brand and you’re like, I’ve got five grand to spend on media for a weekend, Reels seem to do well for us. They bring in engagement, they get shared a lot, photos don’t. Okay, that’s harder to justify. But I think what a lot of people forget then is like, right, but what are you going to put on your trade show display next year? What are you going to put on the side of your rig? What are you going to put on your website? What are you going to put in your catalog? That’s all photo stuff.

And we talked to a lot of brands that are like, hey, we want to redo XYZ for this year. We’re like, great, what assets do you have? And they’re like, oh, I don’t have any. I have some cell phone stuff. It’s like, well, that’s not going to work. So I think if you’re a photographer in the space that’s struggling, which is all of us, my advice would be, one, understand the full breadth of where your content can be used and don’t sell it as just like,

oh, there’s an event this weekend. I’m going to go to the event. I’m going to make a gallery with 500 posts. I’m going to put them up on Facebook. And then next week I’m going to go to another event. That is a really hard way to do it now. I think the real trick is to go to brands and say, hey, I noticed your catalog hasn’t been refreshed in a while. I noticed your website doesn’t have the new C8 on it. I noticed you don’t have any ZR1 content. Do you need all these things? Oh, yeah, we do. Okay, well, what if I go to XYZ events for you and I create that content? I can also do your SEMA booth. I can also do your HPX booth.

I think that’s a challenge because photographers just want to take photos of cars. Then they don’t want to think through all that stuff. But there’s just less and less of that. I mean, I remember back in the day, if you had a picture of your car, it was like the coolest thing in the world. Now, from an event, all you really get to consume is reels and content like that. So it’s hard to be a photographer right now, for sure. There are guys that are still crushing it, obviously.

The other thing I would say, so that’s there’s pricing. Stop undercutting each other, please. There’s what people really need your content for. And then there’s having a unique lens, having a unique perspective on an event. The photographers that come to mind when you say who are the best photographers in the world are probably not doing the same style of photography as everyone else. They’re not doing it over and over again. They have a different look. They have a different vibe. You can see one of their photos and be like, I know who that is right away. I think there’s just been a lot of, we’ve talked about this before, there’s just been a lot of sameness in the space.

Everyone’s like, okay, I’m going to go, I’m going to buy 70 to 200. I’m going to stand at this spot on the track, which is the furthest I’m allowed to go down the track. I’m going to zoom in at 2.8, low to the guardrail, and I’m going to get wheelie shots. It’s like, sick. You and everyone else and me are all doing that same photo. What can you do different? What do people really want to see? How can you change that up? And the best in the space are doing that. So it’s harder than it’s ever been. There’s less budget than there’s ever been. It takes more convincing than it ever has. I still think there’s a path. We hire great photographers all the time. Our clients want good photography.

But having a look and feel is more important than ever, especially as you get higher up into the game. If you go to the OE level, the OEMs are going to have a mood board of like, this is the type of photography we want for this car. And then they’re going to go, who makes those photos now? They’re going to go hire one of those people. So being able to show off that, hey, I can do dark and moody. I can do strobe. I can do action. I can do panning. I can do all these things is important. But yeah, starting out, tough gig. I think salary guys in the space are going to be less and less. It’s just becoming a more gig economy.

So yeah, that’s my current not very helpful take on being a photographer in 2025. But I do think there are more photographers than ever, which is good. But there are more photographers than ever, which is bad. Right. So that’s where I’ll leave it. Really good. I think also if you want to know more about automotive photography, I think there’s more opportunities to get exposure to that than ever before. Right. So you can do you want to list some of the best automotive photographers that people should be watching you and you ran a photography class at the high performance expo. So there’s things like that out there for pre-young photographers.

So this one is tough because it used to be that there. I mean, my story is I came up through a website called Diesel Station, which was a website where you would download car wallpapers for your computer. Remember when you would download wallpapers and there was a forum and then there was a sub forum for automotive photographers and the best automotive photographers in the world happened to be there. And this is why I want forums to come back because forums were really cool and they were super helpful for building a community and getting to know one another.

So yeah, all the best guys like Richard Thompson, Andrew Link, Jeremy Cliff. I mean, they were all there before they even knew how to really take good full. Richard just came out that way. But the rest of us were trying to learn and then got better and then met each other and then kind of grew from there. There’s been attempts at Facebook groups, but it’s just kind of the worst photos get pushed in the feed. And then it’s just a bunch of people telling each other the terrible. So it’s been harder to find a niche group of good photographers.

I will say there are a lot of YouTubers who are really helpful in the photo space, but now you need someone who’s a good photographer, a great photographer who also is good at making YouTube content. So sometimes you get really good YouTubers that aren’t great photographers. So it’s hard. It’s hard to find good communities of these things. And I think there’s still room in the space for someone to step in here and fill that niche. We’ve talked a lot about what businesses can people start, but I would love to see an active pro photo space again, a forum, a real community, someone who’s sponsoring an event and has a spot for photographers to be and hang out and get to meet each other. That’d be huge.

Really good. We weren’t planning on talking about diary, but it was kind of naturally float. I want to jump into the MidwayPlus.com market index because I know a lot of folks are like, tell me where the industry is, Jamie and Justin. And we’re happy to do that. So again, MidwayPlus.com is a portal for B2B, B2C transactions, putting manufacturers together with retailers. And we had Brian Lounsberry on. So if you want to stop watching us and go back and watch the Brian Lounsberry interview. And I will say I’ve had multiple companies reach out to me going, wow, I never knew this thing even existed that Brian built. How do I get a hold of them? So I know Brian’s very, you know, it worked. Thank you for coming on, Brian.

So I want to give a disclaimer that I’m not going to be the financial expert. I’m going to deliver some news, but I don’t want to come across as the financial expert that Brian Lounsberry and his team are. There’s a couple other indexes that you and I watch or just market trends that have popped up. But we have exclusive access to this. We should mention that also. And Brian’s going to provide this for us. Whatever week you and I do a back and forth to kind of give the news to everybody and bring in some tips.

So and I should also say what I’m going to deliver to you is month over month numbers. I would like to see year over year and year to date numbers because that would give us more of an idea of what is holistically we’re in the almost 11th month of the year. Can you believe this stuff? But Brian, to his credit, it’s like, yeah, the company has grown so much, meaning he’s added manufacturers that it changes his base rate. So to his credit, he’s going to give us month over month. For Brian’s sake, I hope that doesn’t change and he keeps growing. It’s a massive thing. But for us, I think for the people at home, they’d like to know what’s year over year, man. Tell me what the year looks like. So that’s a long way of saying I’m just going to give you month over month.

And then you can help me just kind of read in between the lines and I’ll do my best here. So I’m going to give you B2B numbers first. So this would be a manufacturer to a rooftop. So Brian’s got dozens of manufacturers on MidwayPlus.com and he’s got tens of thousands of rooftops. OK, so speed shops and retailers and those types of folks. So 2025 numbers, September to October is flat. So zero percent is the actual number. So month over month is flat versus last year, again, B2B was up seven percent, which kind of surprised me. So I’ll give you a little bit of interpretation, Justin, and you can pile on here. But these are sales from manufacturers direct to a B2B partner. So not the wholesale distributor, warehouse distributor, but direct to the rooftop.

I would read this as end of the year. Things are starting to move at those facilities and they might be stocking up a little bit. But it’s flat. So you can’t read into that. For me, if that trend were to hold true, 25 is going to shape up worse than 24, which from my MidwayPlus.com index and my John Urist index, which is our euphemism for the feel on the street and the guys that report into us, 25 has been a really, really bad year. 24 wasn’t great, but I think people cut margin. They did what they had to do. I will tell you what manufacturers will do at the end of the year to make the number is they’re going to give you a deal if you’re a rooftop. They’re going to say, hey, you know, I know you still have 10 of my fuel pumps. If you take another 20, I’ll cut 10 percent off the cost or 20 percent off the cost.

So that’s the B2B number. Justin, does that reflect how you feel about the industry and what we’ve been hearing? And one more piece I’m going to tell you. What I think I’m going to hear next week in Vegas is everybody’s going to tell me, yeah, the market’s down, bro. The market’s down, but we’re up. That can’t be true for everybody I talk to. So I’ll let everybody follow at home to see if that works out. That’s the B2B numbers. Justin, how do you think that feels?

Yeah, I mean, that that seems to make sense to me. Like, one, I think people just aren’t stocking anymore, really. So I wonder, you know, we did talk to Brian about this and we actually talked to Nikki Fowler about this quite a bit. You know, the people that stock can buy at good deals and they can make money when they sell. And the people that are just one to one on demand, oh, customer just came in, they need this blower. I’m going to order the blower and get it here as quickly as possible and have to pay shipping and stuff like that. That’s slimming the margins quite a bit. So I think B2B, this sounds right to me. I wouldn’t want to be in a position where I just spent a bunch of money on stock either, especially coming into trade show season because we know everyone’s dropping new things right now.

I’ll give an example here. HP Tuners. I just bought an MPVI3 like two weeks ago and then they dropped the MPVI4 yesterday, pre-sema release. So, sucks to be me. You guys do have my address though if you need me to send me one. But it’s, you know, I think a lot of people are like, I’m not going to order right now because a lot of new things are probably coming during trade show season. So this would be interesting. This is a good case for year over year because I would like to know, is this in every September to October type of thing or are we flat or up or down compared to trade show season last year? So, yeah, I think I don’t have too much insight here, although that feels right. If you would have said it’s up, I would have been surprised about that.

No, that’s fair. And I should say this, we’re going to, I’m going to mix topics here a little bit, but the value of a new product really shines through in the fourth quarter, right? The new product launch, like we just talked about, it drives interest in your entire portfolio. I’ll say that again. When you drop a new product, everything gets lifted and it sometimes isn’t even a part that’s related or a car that’s related. It just drives attention in your brand. It gets traffic to your sites. It’s something’s going on and it reminds you of a product that was launched a year ago. Oh, I forgot to pick up one of those. So I think that’s what’s going on from a B2B standpoint. All right. So this is the B2C. So this is business direct to consumer and more manufacturers are going direct to consumer. This is an interesting trend in the last few years. There are still companies, as Brian very elegantly described, so did Nicky, right? Where the wholesale distributor is everything and they handle everything for manufacturers and that’s just where you get the part.

B2C numbers, according to MidwayPlus.com, 2025 September to October numbers down 3.9%. Last year, 2024 B2C numbers September to October down 5.6%. I would say those numbers are about the same. So we’re down 4% now, B2C. We were down about 5.5% last year. For me, that’s the trend. Customers, consumers are not buying products as they have in the past. And I think this is probably a trend for the last three years as this contracts. So I think a lot of what you and I feel is probably that consumer number more than the B2B play, which is, again, your shops that are stocking up on parts. Getting a deal on superchargers, you know, just making sure they’ve got the hot movers.

But the consumer, I’ll say confidence, consumer enthusiasm for performance parts is down 4% month over month. I mean, that tracks for me for sure. One, I think we’re coming to the end of the year somehow and people are realizing like, oh man, like the bank account’s a little lower than I like it. There’s uncertainty with jobs, especially if you’re a big company right now. I think a lot of people are pulling back a little bit. Then, I mean, we’re in Michigan.

You just had the last drag strip day of the year. Like, that’s done. I just put wheels on a car and I know I’m not going to drive the car for like six months now because we’re about to go in winter and I don’t want it out in the wild. So like, it feels like all the spending is done, especially in the Midwest. Now everyone has to travel, go to shows, do holidays, get through Christmas, and then, you know, just like Brian said, tax season. But just like Brian said, you know, then it starts to trend upward for the rest of the year. So this makes sense to me. It’s not alarming. The other thing I would say is all the industries that we deal with are down as well. So it’s not as if, oh, people just don’t like cars anymore because they’re in the XYZ. It’s like, no, people are just spending less in general. There’s just less to go around. And if they’re going to buy a new hunting rifle, right, then that three grand comes out of the blower fund now. It’s not like, oh, I also have the supercharger fund and the hunting rifle fund. So I think people are going to continue to just be able to buy from one category versus another.

And we’re just going to have to go forward with that. And then at some point I do want to tariff download from someone who actually understands how tariffs work and how they’re affecting everybody in this space to really figure out, like, where has that money gone and what are the effects of that. So if you’re listening and you know about tariffs and how they’re affecting big companies, please let us know. So that was the market index brought to you by MidwayPlus.com. That’d be a great company to advertise with us, don’t you think?

I mean, it sounds really good when we say market index brought to you by MidwayPlus.com. And it does seem like they would be a great first partner. And now, I mean, we have all these subs now. It’s just, yeah, it doesn’t make sense. Two other, I mean, you and I have been talking about this for years, right? There’s two other things that we watch that affects the entire automotive and automotive aftermarket industry, right? Like the new car average transaction price has now gone over $50,000. That’s the cost of a new car. We have talked about this before on this podcast. And we haven’t been around on the podcast for a long time, but we’ve been talking about this for over five years in other formats of the automotive advantage.

And then car repossessions, folks that took out too big of a loan on a new expensive vehicle, is I think it’s a 15-year high. So back toward the financial crisis of 2008, 910. And I love your point about the fund for the supercharger or the hunting rifle or the kids’ braces or whatever. There’s just less of that money to go around because we’ve got this creep about everything’s costing more money. We’re now at $50,000 for a new car. And a lot of it is the performance cars that have built this entire industry are just so expensive. And it has kept up with the used car cost as well. So it’s just something we need to watch and make everybody aware of. And you may make a product that has, you don’t think it is related to a new car or new truck transaction at all. But I’m telling you, because that truck costs more money, there’s less money to buy your race part for the circle track car that goes into competition. So I don’t know. Do you want to pile on anything else there?

there? I think this is a rant everyone’s familiar with. But Porsche just posted that their profits are down 99% or something like that. Even though they’re charging way more for every car. But that was just greed. They just kept jacking up pricing. Every Porsche got more expensive. They made it harder to buy them. They jacked on $100,000 ADMs onto the top models. People got tired of the game. That has to be solved at some point. Like Porsche is a car that was obtainable for people back in the day and now way less so. I saw a thread on Reddit yesterday. The guy was like, “Hey, I’m at the dealer right now. Is this a good price for a new Supra?” It was $80,000. Like, the Supra is cool. It’s not $80,000 cool, I don’t think. And the consensus in the thread was like, “No man, I paid $65,000 for mine and I wouldn’t pay more than $60,000.” Even as an owner of one of these things. Like, yeah, the fact that the average car from not even that long ago to now has gone up so much. Raptor, great example. Window was $79,000. COVID hits, goes up to $94,000. Same truck. Comes back down now to $80,000 but still games on it. That’s weird. ZR2, when I bought my ZR2 in $17,000, the most expensive one you could get was $46,000. Today, better truck, cooler, $35,000, whatever. $65,000, $67,000. So, talking $20,000 delta from $17,000 to now, that $20,000 is $20,000 that I would have given to buy Method wheels or a Supra charger or whatever. And now I don’t have it. On top of that, no one’s buying these cars cash. So, not only are they buying them for $62,000, $65,000, $80,000, but their interest rate is way higher. So, their monthly payment is way higher and everything else is more expensive too. So, like, how anyone’s modifying your car right now is pretty unbelievable.

And the fact that everyone I know is actively still modifying cars is pretty impressive to me. But, like, yeah, it’s getting harder and harder for sure. Something has to break. I saw interest rates came down today, I think. So, a little more easing there would be great for everybody. But it’s hard because then I guess for me I’m like, okay, well then people have to make things cheaper. But it’s like, what making things cheaper is just to slide into having less money too. So, I don’t know the fix, but it’s interesting to watch

yeah, let’s just keep track of that. We’re going to bring it up until it breaks, I guess. Justin, let’s go to the next topic, which is events, car shows, drag racing, you know, lifestyle events around the automotive industry are about the only source of a company reaching a consumer that by being at the car show you know they’re into cars and you break through that wall of an AI-generated media, which is something we’re facing together as an industry.

There’s a bunch of bad news about auto events in the last two weeks, right? We had this cars and coffee event, excuse me, cars and copters event in California, and then a Gatlinburg kind of takeover disaster, which leads you to the theory of have we just, have we made these things too big? And it dawned on me this past Sunday, it was at the drag strip, you mentioned this. We had a Fox Factory F-150 there with a supercharger, which absolutely rips.

Kirk Senka was there, Procopio Cusimano was there, Ben Kaminski from the Seymour Garage was there with me. And it was just a test and tune. It was just a test and tune at your local drag strip, and it was nuts. It was the last day. It was 55 and sunny, which in Michigan is like the best day. We all know you make more horsepower on cool days. Everybody was flying. They’re also breaking stuff, which is, you know.

But it dawned on me, man, this simple event is just so refreshing. I don’t have a bunch of rules. I don’t have people screaming on the loudspeaker about, you know, the race of the century kind of stuff going on. There’s just people out enjoying cars, trying to go fast on their own set of rules. We’re still going to have monster events, you know, that we’re going to one in Vegas, right? Like it’s still over the top.

But what’s going on in the culture with cars? How do manufacturers still lean into these events and still find great customers who obviously love their product and love being around their cars and love putting money in their cars? And are there any dangers that you see from having too much of a good thing? It’s funny because we complained for 10 years that no one was into cars, and now they’re into cars and we’re like, “There’s too many people in the car!” So I understand that it’s always a back and forth thing. But like, yes, there was definitely a time where we all sat around and were like, “Hey, no one’s coming to the drag strip. What if we added drone racing? What if we did jet flybys? What if helicopters could come in?” And now people are doing that and we’re realizing, “Oh, okay. This is too much now.” There’s like huge hordes of people. Everyone’s trying to get in for the Gram. It’s just like I feel it. I’m talking to people all the time. It’s like, “I don’t want to go to that event.” It’s just like too much, man. The line to get in and the fees and the, “I don’t need the whatever. I don’t need a jet flyby. I just want to see cool cars.”

So in a cool way, this like purist thing is coming back where people are like, “I just want to go and just be calm. I just want to see a normal thing.” I went to a local Cars and Coffee by me. This place is called Captain and Bird. Captain and the bird? Captain and Bird? It was so zen. It’s like in this little warehousey district. It’s an art gallery type of thing, which is cars in a parking lot. You’ve got to come through the middle. It’s kind of small. It’s only 50 cars, but like all kinds of cool cars, all manufacturers, people just walking around drinking coffee. There’s no DJ. There’s no… just cars. I was walking around. I was like, “Man, this is so zen. This feels like a nice Sunday activity as opposed to, “There’s going to be a drift pit and a monster mash.” I was like, “Okay, I don’t really want all this stuff.” So I think it’s cool, obviously, that the big things exist.

We heard from Monterey Car Week that it got taken over by a bunch of YouTubers and Instagrammers and people were revving and lighting cars on fire with crazy exhausts and people were over that. H2O got ruined previously and all those dummies seemed to have gone to Gatlinburg to ruin Gat and go to gas stations and do the same thing. Cars and Copters was just an unfortunate event for sure. I mean, helicopters crash, that is the thing that happens, but like, “Do we need to be… Does this need to exist like this or could we just have a car show and they can go to the airport and look at helicopters?”

Then I think we’re going to see that. I think there’s going to be a return to like, “Hey, let’s just chill out. Let’s just have a regular event. You don’t need fireworks. You don’t need all this stuff. Just come for the cars and enjoy it.” That purity is going to be cool. I think we’ve seen some events that do that pretty well. It’s going to be hard because you’re going to have to regulate it. You’re going to have to let only the right people in, but I do think the winners are going to be more of that. I’ve been talking to people around our town that are like, “Man, we just need a secret kind of chill, cars and coffee that we don’t talk about on Instagram.”

There’s going to be more and more of that for sure. But if you’re an event person, you like big events. You like big ticket sales. You like all that stuff. We’ve talked to Kurt Johnson. We’ve talked to other people like, “When the track’s down, I want something else to do.” Just that balance there. Justin Keith just had his event. He had some bad weather, which sucks because we were really, really rooting for that event to be kickass. It sounds like they had a great foundation there though, but that’s a good pairing to me. Drag racing, eating good, barbecue, that’s fun. It’s not over the top. There’s a concert at night. That’s a cool thing.

But yeah, this over-indexing of crazy events has definitely put a damper on the spirit of a lot of people. I think people are like, “Get off my lawn about it a little bit.” But yeah, I would like to see a return to a much more chill, car-first environment. I think that’s a good overview, and let’s give some advice to vehicle manufacturers, car builders, parts manufacturers. I think it’s pretty obvious, but do your homework before you go to these events. I think when Keith Wilson’s interview comes out where he goes into great detail about how they evaluate a show and an event, really pay attention to what Keith Wilson’s going to tell you,

because it’s not just the numbers of people through the gates. Oh, 100%. Spoiler alert for the Keith episode, he and Nicky, I think, both talked about going to an event and realizing that they were playing the wrong music in their display. They just didn’t know the audience well enough, and they were playing whatever corporate rock and roll, and it was not that type of an event. And overnight, they adjusted, changed the music, and had more people come in. So as you plan out your calendar, you should be exploring these events in advance, sending a team the year before you plan to go, and really be like, “What is the vibe here? How many broccoli-headed kids are there? What’s the vape to normal person ratio?” Try to figure all that out, and then dial in your display for that crowd. Obviously, keep your brand intact. But I think there’s going to be more and more of that, especially as these things scale. I’m imagining there are people taking regular displays to some of these takeover events and being like, “Oh, my God, this is not working at all.”

No. No. All right. Super good advice. Justin, we had a very loyal listener reach out to us and said, “First of all, your podcast is amazing.” They actually said that, so we’re going to brag a little. Thank you for that. And, hey, look, you guys talk about a content strategy, and you guys point toward Justin Keith as a guy who has an amazing content strategy and who’s doing $600,000 a month at a speed shop. Like, “I hear you.” I’m paraphrasing. It was a very well-thought-out long letter to us.

And he said, “Look, I explored it. I looked at doing it, having somebody internally do my content. I’ve talked to a bunch of agencies, but, you know, you guys are talking about something that’s really expensive.” So I’ll say yes. It can be expensive. I’ll also say it can be shockingly affordable. I’m trying to give, like, as the client in this relationship, I’ve spent $500,000 to $700,000 a year on social media content, and I’ve spent— I want to say nothing, but I’ll say I’ve spent very little or made it part of an employee’s job, which I think is probably where a lot of folks get started, like, “Hey, are you good on Instagram? Welder? Like, could you do some Instagram stuff for me?”

It’s a pretty straightforward ask. You do these types of quotes every day, but can you walk through— where do we start with a shop that says, “All right, damn it, man. I’m watching this podcast called the Automotive Advantage.” They’re bringing in real examples of content, social, finding the media, finding the customer. How do I connect with the customer? Real examples, and they’re bringing in examples of people blowing it out of the water and changing the course of their company’s projection.

“Where do I start, Justin? Where do I start?” And then let’s develop a couple tiers of budgets so that it makes sense for someone. And I— look, there are people that are watching this that have spent more money than us, that have done bigger things than us. I get it. I think this is more for the person that gets it. They want to start, or they’re like, “Look, I got something kind of going. It’s kind of working. I know I’ve got some channels that are working, but how do I take that next step? How do I have a full-time staff? How do I really get my way in there and get— share a voice?”

Justin, take it away, pal. Well, it’s a hard one. This should have been the whole pod. Okay, a couple things. One, I would say you can’t really— you can’t operate half a CNC machine. Okay? So if you want to start CNCing billet aluminum parts, at some point you have to buy the CNC machine, get an operator, get it shipped to your place, level the floor, put the CNC machine in, have a sunk cost of buying this hot CNC machine, and then operating it for a period of time until you make your money back. You can’t level the floor and then be like, “When’s it going to start working?” And I think a lot of people try to look at marketing as like, “Well, I just want to incrementally do it the whole way to completion.” It’s like, “Well, at a certain point you do have to invest to make the next step sometimes.”

You may get lucky and be like, “Oh man, I’m just best friends with a kid who’s amazing at making Instagram content. Sick. Hey kid, we’re buddies. Why don’t you come in and run my Instagram for me?” That might happen to you. It’s funny when you look at Justin Keith, all the people he happened to be friends with 15 years ago all happened to have that same vision and all went and did it. Where he is today is not where you should be looking, where you should be looking at where he was when he started, and how did that start, not what is he doing now.

It’s just like, don’t ask rich people what they do now. Ask them what they did before they were rich. I’m going to start off by saying you’re not going to be able to piecemeal your way to the whole thing. At a certain point, you’re going to have to dive in and make the investment to scale your marketing department. That said, before you do any of that, we talk about this all the time, you have to know your product, you have to know your customer, you have to know how to connect them. If you’re a shop and you’re like, “Okay, I sell a widget to guys with ZR2s.”

Who is my ZR2 customer and what is my widget and what is the number one way to connect with these people? It’s this one Instagram channel and there’s one guy who crushes it in the ZR2 space. If I could work with that guy and make that guy talk about my product, that could move 50 of these things. That doesn’t mean I have to understand an entire influencer agreement and I have to work with American Muscle HD and I have to get Cletus 10 cars and we have to go flip a bus.

Very simple. Who is the one person for this little tiny niche that you have that can really move the needle for you? You told me a story before we started the pod about one Instagrammer, YouTuber, unboxed one product and they sold 10 of them. You can start there and then once that’s working, be like, “What else can I do with this person? What’s the next thing I can do with this person?” Then just start going. Justin Keith, Cletus, those guys didn’t start with 15 video guys. They started with one or zero video guys.

To me, it’s really like, what is my product? What is my customer? What is the number one way to connect my product to my customer? You might be like, “It’s Easter Jeep Safari in Moab. Every Jeep guy needs my fire extinguisher and none of them have it. I’m going to go to Easter Jeep Safari. What do I need to do that? I need to wrap my Jeep. I need to get a 10 by 10 with my logo on it and I need to bring my wife who’s a pretty good photographer to capture the event. Sick. Now we’re starting somewhere. Now do that and then meet people and do the whole thing and post the content and then, “Okay, where is the next place people are going to be?” We talked about this actually with Keith about how do you scale a rig program. At scale, a rig program is a million bucks a year, but it starts with a pickup truck with a 10 by 10 in the back and then you go from there. That’s where I would start if I wanted to grow the automotive advantage and we had to pick our next way to do that. It’s like, “All right, well, who’s listening to us now?

Let’s model what that person looks like that isn’t listening to us and let’s find one way to reach that person in the future. Then let’s do it again and again. Over time, those things are going to pay off to where you’re like, “Oh, we’re selling more, we’re making more.” Now I can’t afford to bring that video guy that I wanted to bring two years ago but I finally just got around to. I think we’ve taught a class on that before. We’ve taught people about that product customer connection

and I think just knowing one step of that tree, how can I make one step stronger and then the next one and then the next one. Because if you start with, “Oh, well, these guys have three YouTube channels and they have 50 people running around and they have 20 race cars and they’re on sick weekend, they’re doing all this other stuff, I can’t do all that.” It’s like, “No, they couldn’t either.” Literally, I’ve done this before, just scroll on their YouTube channel to the first YouTube video and watch that one and try to make that video. Don’t try to make the one they just did. But am I on track here? What do you think? I mean, where would you start?

I think that’s an awesome blueprint of how you get going. I think this listener really wants to know the budget. Like, what is the expectation for me to do what you just described? I will say, I really like the idea of if you know it’s one event and you can plus up your social content for that one event, maybe that’s when you spend extra money to try it. We’ve talked about it. If professional video and professional photography breaks through the barrier on some of these channels and go do it, that isn’t always the truth.

Justin Keith talked about the startup video on a Cadillac V with a cam that he just happened to hit with his iPhone and it got millions of views. So you never know, but there’s a couple of key learnings here, right? I know what happens when you don’t do social media. You’re not going to win. Okay, that’s just fact. And then I like the analogy you always do. If you look at some of these big channels and they launch a new product, or if you look at some of these big channels and they run an event, or if they ask for a sponsor for their race car,

that’s just how the world is measured right now, baby. That’s just how we size things up. So you’ve got to get in the game. If I’m— let me give you some idea. Like, if I’m a shop that makes a top line, I do five million a year and I build custom cars. My rough numbers are if you’re an established brand, you’re between five and ten percent of that number is what you spend on marketing. If you’re a newer, less than five year old company, you ought to be in the ten to twenty percent is what you spend on marketing. So if I give you those numbers, tell me what I should be spending on a social media content strategy. Go.

Go. Yeah, I mean, first of all, the ten percent rule is a great rule, right? You should be spending ten percent of gross on marketing. Nobody’s doing that. Nobody’s doing that. Which means to me that there’s a huge opportunity there. Like, on a million bucks, right, that’s a hundred grand a year. And I know a lot of people are listening to this that do well over a million dollars a year at their shop that are like, “Dude, if I spent a hundred grand on marketing, we’d be bankrupt instantaneously.”

So you don’t even need a hundred grand. That would be great if you go to an agency or the local kid who’s really good at websites and YouTube and making some content and you’re like, “Dude, I got a hundred grand.” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I’m in. I’m a partner for life here, right?” So I don’t think you need that much to start. But if you’re at fifty grand a year for content creation for a million dollar business, that is a small percent of the money that you’re making. It will make a huge return for the business. And over the course of time, it will start to pay off. It will.

And again, you don’t need big numbers. We have the thing behind us. We have a thousand subscribers, right? We’ve put a lot of time into this. We’ve put a lot of money into the studio and the build out and the planning and all that. But at a thousand subs, we feel the impact. So if you start out, you’re like, “I got fifty grand. I’m going to go to one event, two events this year. I’m going to bring a content creator. We’re going to be smart. We’re not going to go to Easter Jeep Safari, post everything from Easter Jeep Safari while we’re there, come back with nothing. We’re going to go to Easter Jeep Safari. We’re going to spend the entire time we’re there shooting our product, going to different locations, getting different looks, making some videos. We’re going to use those for a month or two or three or four. Then we’re going to go to another event. That’s where I would start. I think fifty grand can jump start any shop. It was like, “I want an actionable thing. I want to do something.” A hundred grand gets you into a really good place where you can travel more because travel eats up a lot of these costs.

And then if you’re making five million dollars a year, you should be spending $500,000 on marketing at 10%. But let’s say you’re spending $200,000, $250,000. You will be in the top tier of whatever kind of category you’re in. You will be able to really affect change in the media landscape with that kind of money. You’ll really be able to do some cool content there. If you could do that for two or three years, you will look back and be like, “I can’t believe I didn’t do that to start. I can’t believe I waited ten years to do that.” It’s a huge upfront investment. I get that, but it will work. So, yeah, 10% rule. It’s great. Do it at 5% and get that number. Get comfortable with it and go. I mean, you guys, we’re spending that kind of money on race cars and dumb shit. So, spend it on a marketing kit.

It’s not dumb shit. We love to go race cars, Justin. You’re being kind of a dick right right now. I know, but you have it, is what I’m saying. You have the money. You’re spending it on boats. Spend it on a marketing kit. All right. Just a couple comments. I think this is really important for people that have made it this far in the podcast. They’ll appreciate it. Remember, Lounsberry talked about the private equity held companies and the difference maker is they’re spending money on marketing. And we’re hearing so many of them pull marketing. That’s the first thing they do. And they wonder why nobody knows they exist anymore.

I’ve watched private equity finance people be emotionally impacted by social content of a company that they were about to spend over $50 million on. And they’re not the most hardened financially stout people and emotionally impacted by great social content. It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal. So, all right. I think we beat that one, but hopefully that helps our listener. Comment. Let us know if we’ve done a good job there. lot of people don’t think about this,

but they can and should meet with people and have this conversation with them. So, you know, shameless plug. If you’re like, I don’t know how much money to spend and I don’t know what to do, find someone like a Drive Line Studios, find someone like a, you know, Jamie, and say, hey, this is where I’m at. This is where I want to go. This is my plan. Where do I start? And maybe they say, oh, man, for five or 10 grand, we can sit down with your team. We can go through the whole plan. We can put mission vision values in place. We can kind of sort through this and then say, this is what you need to do. You’re going to look at that and be like, yeah, that seems like a reasonable plan going forward. I don’t think we have the money for all of that. We can do XYZ, but that type of consultation will go a long way. And if you don’t want to do that, I’m sure our friend, OpenAI, will help you with this and at least point you in the right direction of like, hey, yeah, if you’re in that space, it seems like this is a good event to go to. Have you ever thought about it? At least start those conversations in your head and then back into a reasonable budget. But you’re not going to do it free unless you just happen to look into that, which would be awesome. But it doesn’t have to bankrupt you either.

Let’s move to artificial intelligence. We have been talking about AI and the impact of the auto industry and the automotive aftermarket and opportunities there a bunch. My only topic on this, say, is I’ve been using it, I would say, just as an assistant. I don’t know how else to say it, but wrote a press release for next week, one of my clients. I wrote a press release in five minutes and it was freaking great. It would have taken me half hour to an hour to write it, proof it in the old way.

I put together the high performance expo educational program when we had a bunch of speakers kind of not organized, but I put all that in there. My advice about AI right now is, gosh, if you’re listening to this thing and you aren’t using one form of AI daily, like you’re behind, you’re behind. There’s no other way to say it. You are five years behind, but you can get caught up in 30 days. Get an account on chat, GPT, and just go to work.

The other thing, and we’ve coached people on this, is what I’m finding is the more input I give to these machines, the more background, the more rough draft of something I can put in, man, I get super high quality out the other side and it’s five seconds, it’s 10 seconds later it comes out. Get up to speed on AI quickly. We’ve been coaching that here for a couple months. And then I’m ready for the next phase. I’m ready for that assistant that listens to me, that’s watching stuff and is thinking for me. I think that’ll be the next plateau for me. How are you using AI today?

mean, we use AI for all the things you talked about. I do think that this agentic AI is kind of the next wave, which if you’re willing to give enough info, scary, you know, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Plod, but Plod is a company that makes kind of an AI assistant that you wear, it’s a wearable AI. I’m very interested in testing one out, but essentially you wear it all day, and at the end of the day you could say, hey, what did I promise to people that I was going to do by the end of today? And be like, oh, you told Jamie you were going to send him a thing, you told this other client you were going to do this. It’s like, great, right? It’s like having a perfect assistant that’s just like, okay, he just said we’re going to send this video over at the end of the day, okay, right? So that’s cool. The next phase of that would be that this agent would be like, okay, Jamie just promised that he’s going to send a press release over. Let me start working on it for him. Let me deliver it to his inbox and make a schedule that says at 1130 he’s going to work on this press release, and it’s here, and here’s the background info, and here’s the event, and write like, that’s already existing. And if everything I just described to you sounded like something straight from the future, it’s happening now. So to your point, if you’re not even at the base level of like it writing an email for you every once in a while, like I would highly encourage people to get there.

I think it’s only going to get crazier, right? The AI we have right now is the worst it’s ever going to be. So it’s just going to get better and better. OpenAI is doing a lot. Sora, right? You’ve been playing with Sora. We talked about Sora in another meeting earlier today. Incredibly powerful. Weirdly powerful. Give me your Sora thoughts real quick. Did you get my first of all, Sora’s an invite only app. I was able to log right on and start an account. Did you get my invitation to join?

join? I did not, but I did get. I am in as well. I think it’s if you use AI a bunch. Yes, but I guess if you’re listening and you don’t have an invite, I have several invite codes we can send to someone. So let us know on that. Yeah. A couple things. I think if they’ve made it this far in this podcast and there’s a bunch bunch of. Let me stop you really quick. Someone on YouTube did find out that I said I would send them five dollars if they made it to the end of like one of our earlier podcasts and they left it as a comment. So I’m going to follow up with that person because I do. I am going to PayPal them or sell them the five dollars. So from now on, that’s gone. He was the first one to claim it. You can’t go back in time. Now I’m not going to send it to a million people, but props to the listener that made it there.

Good. I’m glad to hear you’re paying your debts. I think folks could watch this and go. They’re just marketing and sales guys. You know, they’re just talking about AI putting out marketing content. Oh, oh, no. Oh, no. You’ve got AI tracking engineers. You got AI doing predictive tests on automotive parts. You got AI that’s streamlining the manufacturing of vehicles, which the standard is five to seven years. And they’re saying this is going to be less than a year to develop new cars. So this is not this is not just about us talking about emails and goofy sort of videos. Right. Like this is the real deal. You got to get on track with this thing. OK, Sora for me, scary as hell. I’m watching videos. And right now I’m watching something and I’m into the video. And thank God they’re breaking the reality wall. And they they tell you at the end, the hook is, oh, that was a fake cat with a machine gun or, you know, whatever, whatever I’m watching.

But holy shit, when they stop doing that or the ones that don’t give me the punchline of this is a Sora manufacturer, you can’t tell, dude. You can’t tell. It’s super scary. We’re talking about using this because people use this technology to start campaigns around whatever you’re doing with a car or a truck. And it’s some crazy off-road scenario. And you’re a Bronco company and people aren’t going to know the difference, man. And they’re going to think it’s your products. And people are going to start doing this first and everybody else is going to be left behind. Everybody will be wondering what happened to their company because they didn’t follow this trend. It is that big, Justin. I don’t think I’m exaggerating this, right?

No, I don’t think so at all. We’ve had a fictional race series that we’ve been talking about in our content creation group for a little over a year now called the RAV 400. Because we love old RAV 4s, first gen RAV 4s. And we’re like, man, it’d be so sick to just buy a bunch of RAV 4s and make a race called the RAV 400. And it’s been an off-road race with stock RAV 4s. Hilarious. Now we’ve decided last weekend, we decided that we think we could have the entire race. We think we could launch it, have a website, have AI registrations, have driver profiles.

We think we could pull off the entire race with video, with a live stream of the event entirely in AI. And I think we could get legitimate real sponsors because who cares if people are following along, why not sponsor it? I think we will see completely fabricated events in AI. I don’t know. I’ve been talking about Weber Valley Speedway forever because I love them. Did you see the latest Weber Valley Speedway news? So Weber Valley Speedway, if you’re not following them, is an AI fabricated dirt circle track.

And it’s one of the coolest things on the internet, I think. They started on Facebook. And now they have an Instagram channel where they’re putting Sora created reels on it. They had one recently where the Sora video was that the power company kept cutting off their lights so that they could intimidate them into paying their bill. So the video is AI generated, people going around a dirt track, the lights cut off, they turn back on, it’s a big wreck, everyone’s upside down.

The local NBC news affiliate does not know that Sora exists and they don’t know that Weber Valley is a fake. And they run a story about the power company cutting off the lights at Weber Valley. Now Weber Valley has Selena 52 and now there’s a police station involved in this whole thing. But Weber Valley is a legitimate track as far as I’m concerned at this point. I don’t live there but I’m up to speed with everything that’s going on in their little AI fabricated world. They’re making the news now. So like, yeah, it’s happening. And in five years there are going to be entire brands that are built from scratch, just from somebody’s mind. And they’re going to be races, I think. And they’re going to be events. And if all of that sounds absolutely insane to you, it is. But it’s happening, right? So you got to stay on top of it. I’m excited to see real brands enter the space.

Yeah, you’re describing it and I’m thinking, well, geez, F1 did that with two fake teams in the F1 movie that came out. So you could take the F1 race and you can Sora modify the race and your fake F1 team could be on the podium. This is not crazy. This is very doable right now. And you can be fast too. Like I saw there was a this is real news, I believe, a truck with aggressive monkeys that have COVID and hepatitis recently overturned and escaped. So I don’t know if that’s real, but Weber Valley immediately had a monkey shooting contest at their track with these aggressive monkeys. So like you could stay very topical now. You could be on top of it in this environment. And like, yeah, so now I don’t even know if the first news story was true. That could have been AI too. But like there’s just going to be when we talked about the metaverse years ago, everyone thought that was so far off. We’re we’re in it now and there will be brands that win in the space. And it’s not trickery. I think it’s just like memes. I think it’s just being part of the culture.

And it’ll be interesting to see who can weave that correctly. Justin, can I get an agentic AI agent that could respond to your text messages that everyone sends to you that go unnoticed? Yes. I had a very interesting call recently with a company that does text messaging for businesses. And they’ve built an AI specifically for closing leads through text messaging. And they were telling me some pretty advanced stuff that was very interesting. But essentially someone would come to your website at midnight. They would fill out an interest form that they want to get an appointment at your rap shop. You’re not going to wake up till 7 a.m. So you have the most interested customer you could have.

And eight hours later, they’re back into their regular life. So this service would come in right there and text them. But they’ve trained it to like misspell things and then like add another text where they put the little star and spell it right. So it seems like a person. They’ve taught it to like double reply to things like one answer and then be like, oh, and this other thing too. Right. So they are doing things to make it seem very human.

I think you could also just be up front and the text be like, hey, I’m an AI. I know it’s midnight. The shop doesn’t get until 7 a.m. But like how can I help you? What kind of questions do you have? Well, how much was a rap cost for a Bronco? Oh, it’s between sixty five hundred and ten thousand dollars. PPF blah blah. This is our warranty. OK, well, how booked up is the shop? Well, the shop is pretty booked up. We get you in the next two weeks. Again, I’m an AI agent. I’m not trying to trick you in anything, but at least I can get that going and then be like, would you like me to schedule you a time on the calendar to talk to someone at the shop? Yeah, let’s do it at 8 a.m. Boom, you’re in. So if I start answering text messages in a timely manner, you know, it’s not real. You know, I’ve signed up for this service. Yeah. And I’m I’m good with it.

It’s fake. Justin, for sure. Man, I think that’s it. We’re I think we’ve given these people an unfair advantage this week. Don’t you think I do. And that’s the pod.

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