The Latest Digital Marketing Trends in Retail Automotive – Mark Sokal, CEO of Sokal Digital Advertising

Sokal

On today’s show, we welcome back Mark Sokal, CEO of Sokal Digital Advertising, a powerful marketing agency with over 100 employees and well over 350 clients around the nation. Sokal’s marketing background is rooted in dealership operations. Mark is a 20-year automotive veteran having moved up in the automotive ranks from Sales Manager to owning several dealerships.

SokalVIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

Jim Fitzpatrick: Dealers are really challenged today with making the most of their advertising and marketing dollars. I don’t need to tell any of you out there that it’s all about running your dealerships the most efficient way and getting the biggest bang for your buck. Well on today’s show we’re joined by Mark Sokal who is the founder and CEO of Sokal advertising of North Carolina. Welcome to the CBT.

Mark Sokal: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me back.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, as you say, it’s great to have you back and in the studio. Thanks for making the flight in and now we appreciate you being here. As I said in my opening comment there about dealers that are really focused on trying to run a very, very efficient dealership nowadays and advertising is right up there with all of the other major expenses that dealers have, some are spending as much as a thousand dollars a copy if not better. Last time we had you in, I think you mentioned a really low number of around 300 bucks a copy, which we had a lot of comments on, they said, “I need to talk to that guy.”

But talk to us about some of the trends in the automotive space that you see coming down the pike from your perspective. You’re over literally hundreds of dealerships. It’s Sokal advertise, you guys have been around a long time, but talk to us about some of the trends that you see and maybe some of the areas that dealers can save some money on when it comes to advertising.

Mark Sokal: That’d be great. Thank you again for having me back.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Sure.

Mark Sokal: I do want to mention to you that last time I was here I probably got 25, 30 phone calls and texts about the $300 a car you just brought up.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah I can imagine.

Mark Sokal: Some of them are calling, current clients and saying, “I’m not at $300 a car.” But they were pretty close. So again, thank you. And I appreciate being here. I think also, one thing we mentioned last time I was here was that, pick one thing, own that one thing. That’s how I learned the car business. If you’re going to spend a certain amount of money, you can’t be everywhere. So pick one and own it. And I went back and I’ve been thinking about it and for the last year or two, and I don’t necessarily know how at this point you can pick one and own that one.

I think the new trend right now, obviously it’s digital, but when people hear digital, they think just Google. They don’t, that’s all that’s on their mind is, “Oh, we’ve got to spend so and so on Google.” And there’s so many other things that go into the digital. I mean, I think it starts with your website, I think that almost every deal that we have runs a second website, they have to run their factory website and then they run a second website-

Jim Fitzpatrick: And talk to us about that.

Mark Sokal: So I think how we did, what we made easy was, we will take care of your factory website, but we’re going to run our website. And the advantage of running our website is real easy. I don’t have to stay in your PMA. I mean with the factory-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Which is a nice feature.

Mark Sokal: They’ll go out nine, 10 miles and that’s it. I can obviously go out a lot further. So that’s first, and that’s your dealership. The first image of the dealership is your website.

Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s right. There’s no question about it.

Mark Sokal: I think you need to start with your website and what it looks like and how it’s performing.

And once you get past your website, then you need to look at what you’re doing digitally, not just spending money with Google. There is so many other things. And there’s so many ways to get to the client you want to get to and be in front of them all the time. And we all know frequency is … That’s it.

It’s all about frequency. I would say to you to every six months or a year there’s something new that comes out, there’s some new thing, there’s some new, this is going to save the world.

Jim Fitzpatrick: It’s going to save the world.

Mark Sokal: But I got to tell you that I’ve been doing a lot of research and we’re doing this for almost every deal we have now, which is CTV.

Connected TV. So if you have Roku, Sling, Hulu, I want to be on your phone. I want to, people are watching their TV on their phone or on their IPAD. So I want to-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Cable subscriptions are way, way down.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely. I still think you need to be on your traditional marketing and traditional cable. Just not to the extent. A perfect example would be, I live in Raleigh. In Raleigh, there’s one cable company Spectrum, 85% of the people live there are hooked up with Spectrum. But now if you go to, let’s say New Jersey, you have to buy three different cable companies to hit right in your PMA.

Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s right. And the dealers that are watching, they have a very similar situation I’m sure in their markets.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely. I mean I think that works. It probably works every where that you have to buy a few different.

With CTV. First thing I would tell you is, I don’t think, my children are 29, 27 and 20 and they don’t even know what cable is. When we hear to cut the cord, they have cut the cord. They are watching and getting their current news and everything on their phone.

So think about that for a first time buyer if you’re in the car business. How many first time buyers can you hit right on your phone directly? That are not watching TV. They’re not reading a newspapers, that are not opening a piece of mail. I think that you need to right now, that CTV is the thing. And then I looked at it cause the cable company could sell you that, your local cable company can sell you connected TV. The difference is, when you get it through your cable company or a company like us, your cable company is probably only going to the people that was subscribed to them at one point and that’s how they get to them.

For us we have two or three different DSPs that we go in and we buy it direct. So you’re not paying that middleman, you’re not paying the cable company to go place it somewhere else. With us we’re going straight to Hulu, straight to Sling. I think that is where trend is going right now.

Jim Fitzpatrick: And for the dealers that are watching on CTV or these 30 second ads, like you would run on TV are they banner ads, walk me through that.

Mark Sokal: That’s a great question. So yes. It could be a 30 second TV spot because one thing you need to do is everything needs to match.

If it’s on your website, your commercial, it needs to be the same thing that’s running on TV. Everything needs to be the same. So yes, you take their current commercial and we run that on CTV now. Now I like fifteens on CTV to be honest with you but we do run a lot of thirties. I would never go longer than 37.

Jim Fitzpatrick: And then how do you control the market so you don’t have a waste factor involved there.

Mark Sokal: That’s a great question. So we can dig so deep that I can say I want to buy this zip code, this income, male, female. I mean we can really dig down to who’s going to see that ad. It’s not like when I think me and you sold cars and we went out to the car and grabbed the newspaper on the back seat and said, “All right, well they read this paper.” Well, we go in the car and press the radio station.

Jim Fitzpatrick: And listen to the station and then buy those stations.

Mark Sokal: And listen to what stations and buy those stations, this is so much deeper and you really know where your money is going. It’s not a guess anymore. And I think with the amount of money that the dealers have to spend at this point, they shouldn’t be guessing. They need to know-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Especially in an age of digital.

Mark Sokal: Especially in this age. So there’s, like I said, there’s so many things in digital. CTV is the big thing right now. Pre-roll is very strong also. What I like about pre-roll is you only pay for that if they watch the entire thing. Let’s say it’s a 30 second spot and they watched five or 10 seconds, they clicked off it. There’s no charge, which is strong ’cause again, you’re getting that impression. People getting your name out there and that’s kind of like free advertising.

Jim Fitzpatrick: And it’s imperative that you get most of the message in that five seconds. Right?

Mark Sokal: That’s what we do. A lot of the CTV is good as image building, branding, but when you go to the pre-roll that’s the first five, 10 seconds you want to say what you need to say.

Jim Fitzpatrick: How important is branding for an auto dealer today. I mean everybody says … People are online and they’re shopping price, price, price, price, and for the dealers that are out there that have got, they’ve been in their community for 40 and 50 years with the family name. Is it still important to build a brand around that name?

Mark Sokal: You could be 40 years in the same spot, but there’s people moving in and out all the time. And also I think what’s important is you want to keep your name good. If you’re coming up with a new thing that you’re going to advertise $99 down, $99 a month, people aren’t looking for that now. It’s not even about the deal at this point. It’s really about the service. It’s like-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Customer experience.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely. I think you have to brand yourself that customer service is going to be popping a line, like going to Disneyland. Rich hotel.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Kind of the rich hotel.

Mark Sokal: Correct.

Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s right. Kind of dialing back a little bit, getting back to the two websites, because I know that, that’s something that your company really has mastered over the years and has worked very well for your clients. Talk to us about, for the dealers that are watching that may not have two websites and they say, “Well wait a minute, mark just said we got to have two websites.” Talk to us a little bit about that in terms of the need of that.

Mark Sokal: Yeah, that’s a really good question and I get that so often. I’m going to give you a different way maybe of looking at it. We are approved with Toyota and we run Toyota websites. Toyota ranks us first and above the national average for the last 13 or 14 months.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Congrats to you on that.

Mark Sokal: Thank you. And when I look at the leads and I look at the conversions, that conversion rate needs to be good. And what we do on our website is we make it so easy to get the lead. There’s always a click here for this. Once we got their name and once we have them visit at the website. Now we could keep going back to them and I think with our website, which we do, one of the things we do on our website is, give you an example. You’re looking for a new Ford escape, you went to the website, you looked at a Ford escape, you looked at a second Ford escape, you may have looked at a third one, you clicked off it and you go home. When you go back to that website, all the specials are going to be a Ford escape.

Jim Fitzpatrick: So you personalize it.

Mark Sokal: We personalize it.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Which is everything right now.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely. So you could be sitting next to your wife at home, looking at the same website on your phone and her phone and you’re looking at two different … Now-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Right. Because you’ve completely personalized it to what my shopping was all about.

Mark Sokal: So what your shopping experience is.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Much like a Zappos or Amazon or what have you.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely. That’s why when you go, let’s say to a news app and you just left Amazon, and then you looked at a pair of shoes, well they’re feeding you that, we’re doing the same thing when you go to the website, there’s not many of the factory web providers that are doing that. I mean, to the point where there are not many factory providers that are even responsive still at this point. And I don’t understand and how you cannot have a responsive website.

Jim Fitzpatrick: ‘Cause all the different tablets and platforms and … That’s crazy.

Mark Sokal: Yeah. So I think it’s important that again, everything matches. And what we do for our clients particularly is let’s just say to have to run their GM site with GM. We will take care of that site as well as our site. So everything matches because obviously you don’t want them to go to one site. There’s a price here and it’s a different price on the other side. So we take care of both sites for you and make sure that everything is-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Any specials, any ads, any thing.

Mark Sokal: Complete service.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Your team does that.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely.

Jim Fitzpatrick: And I know in anticipation of this meeting with you today or this interview I spoke to a couple of your clients and they said the turnaround time is lightning speed versus putting an order in and maybe 24 hours later, 48 hours later they went ahead and made the change.

Mark Sokal: Correct. And I think-

Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s very much needed when a dealer gets a 0% interest rate or a 72 month deal announced or a lease or what have you to have it on there within 90 minutes. Right?

Mark Sokal: Correct. I think me and you are used to, coming from a car business is get it done right now. So at our office, if you call to make a change, it’s going to happen while you’re on the phone.

You’re not going to hang up until it’s done. Now, if you’re asking us to completely redesign the site, that might take a day or two. But if you want to make some kind of change.

Jim Fitzpatrick: It’s just the simple changes that will drive dealers. I know it drove me crazy.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely.

Jim Fitzpatrick: It’s like I’m behind the eight ball because my competitor might have this up already and if somebody visits my site, they don’t see the 0% or they don’t see the special lease or this event or program or what have you.

Mark Sokal: We want to be first. It’s the same thing if you took a nice trade. Sometimes the trade sits behind PDI for a week until they get pictures, until it makes it to the website. As soon as you trade that car in, it’s on your website and we’re going to put stock photos on until you send us the regular photo. But it’s there, immediately. You just …

Jim Fitzpatrick: It’s there right. You know you have it in inventory.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely. You took it in on trade. It’s a nice car. You want to get rid of it. Why let it sit. I think there’s so many things when you have that second site, another good example would be, we give you a report every day that says what cars were looked at, what cars weren’t. So before I would send my used car manager now towards the auction ever again, he’s going to run the report. He’s going to say, “86 people clicked on this. We sold it. We need to get a new one, we need to replace it.” Or, “86 people clicked on this. It’s still sitting here.” What’s that mean? There’s something wrong. Car, miles, collar. There’s something wrong. Price-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Smoker cars, something.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely. I think that all these, and listen, I think we all know at this time where we’re at, everything is data driven.

You need to be, we concentrating everything we do on the data and how much data can I get when I have you on my website? When you go to a factory site, how much data are they going to give you because they’re doing, if you have a Chrysler dealer in this 10 mile radius and then another Chrysler dealer here and another Chrysler dealer there, you’re all kind of mixed together.

I want to be the one that’s different, I don’t want to have the same look, because they’re all gonna look the same too, so I don’t want them to look … And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong obviously with the way they do their sites, it’s fine. It’s just not what I would be doing.

I set this up as a car dealer. I know that if they want to put a banner ad on Friday at three o’clock, honestly they could do it in two seconds themselves. They don’t even have to call us. We have them there in the queue waiting, so they could go line it up, put it on themselves. But if it’s a little more intense, we’re doing it while you’re on the phone. It’s much different. I just think that there’s a lot of new things, but still old school car business, just get it done now.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Well now you’ve got dealers in the industry taking a look at digital retailing. So that website’s going to become even that much more important to the overall sales process because now people are going to stay online much like Carvana showed the industry and some others that you can stay online on your couch, shop for the car, like the car and then buy the car and never leave the comfort of your home. Talk to us about that.

Mark Sokal: Yeah, I agree with you 100%. Every time I go and attend a meeting with a dealer and I try to see everybody as much as I can. But almost the first question they ask me is, “Hey mark, should I be on auto trader? Should I be on cars.com.” And my answer is yes.

So I think that you need to be on those. But here’s what I think, auto trader, the one great thing that they do is, and they’ve showed it to me in writing, they keep their clients on their 15, 20 minutes. I think the last report I looked at from them was 22 minutes on their site.

Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s phenomenal.

Mark Sokal: That’s very strong. Here’s the other side of it. If you’re 22 minutes on the site, you don’t need to beat a premium dealer and have your car show up first because that client, that customer-

Jim Fitzpatrick: They’re shopping.

Mark Sokal: Their shop … They’re going to go through all the cars. So I tell my clients you should be on auto trader or cars, you pick one of them. I don’t necessarily think you need to be on both.

But pick one of them and then I would have my full inventory on auto trader. But I don’t think you need to spend the extra money to be first. I’d rather do an inventory marketing campaign for you where every night I’m downloading every car you have in inventory. And then I’m going to buy that on, let’s say Google. Now if you just traded a 2012 Camry and it’s in your inventory and somebody googles a 2012 Camry, you’re going to come up ahead of everybody ’cause it’s your car. It’s got its own page.

You’re coming up first. Which is strong. We do that in an 11 and in a 13 so we’ll buy one year over on all of your inventory, over and under, obviously, because we want to bring them directly to you. What I don’t want to see happen is, I get home, I just purchased a car. I get home. My neighbor says, “Where’d you get the car?” Auto trader. No, you might’ve found it on auto trader. Again, nothing bad about auto trader because that’s good that they saw it there, but if I could bring them directly. That’s so much better.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Of course.

Mark Sokal: And that’s what we try to do.

Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s right. I was down in Orlando. Switching gears a little bit. I was down in Orlando this past weekend at my nephew’s wedding. I’m sitting on the couch waiting to, before we got to leave and watching a couple of hours of TV and sports and such, every other commercial was a car dealer commercial. Is there still a place for traditional type advertising like that, that says, “Come on in, we got the lowest prices and a jingle and a pretty spokes model and what have you.” And …

Mark Sokal: That’s another great question.

Jim Fitzpatrick: It was crazy. It was like every other commercial.

Mark Sokal: Yeah. I would say to that, you have to do something traditional, you don’t have to own it. But you have to do something traditional and I would say the $99 again is probably not the way you want to go now. The way you want to go now is if you’re on TV is a spokesperson, but not a spokesperson that’s saying come buy the car right now-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Maybe the one that’s kind of taking you around the dealers and showing you the experience.

Mark Sokal: The dealers are just showing you the experience. The experience now is what’s selling cars. We’ve proven to some of our dealers that they’ll drive, a customer will drive 15, 20, 30 miles past to other dealerships to get to you because of your-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Because of the ads.

Mark Sokal: Because of the ad, because of your experience of coming to [inaudible 00:21:21]

Jim Fitzpatrick: If it was Mark Sokal automotive group and not advertising. Out of $100,000 budget let’s say that a dealer spends, in your case, what percentage would be the traditional stuff and what percentage would be the digital and social marketing?

Mark Sokal: What we do with all our clients is we go for 50%. 50% digital. The other 50% has to be digital but not Google for every dollar of their-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Maybe third party lead provider and things that.

Mark Sokal: Absolute. And I think it’s important that they touch, you could go out and get as many people that you could see on TV that are, you’re bringing them directly to your website. That’s what’s important. On our commercials, the website would always be shown on the TV spot. Going back to 50% digital, the other 50% would be traditional. And you’re staff that balloons their staff whatever.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Buy their purchase materials and things like that.

Mark Sokal: But 50% is really the number, it might get higher one day. I mean, look at the newspaper now.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Do you see, we’ve spoken to some other advertising executives such as yourself and they said that they see maybe the pendulum swinging back a little bit with traditional, where dealers are now using more TV to drive to the, do you do agree with that?

Mark Sokal: And that’s where I was going with the CTV. Because I agree people are still, I have a client, I don’t mind mentioning his name if that’s okay.

Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s quite all right.

Mark Sokal: Capitol Ford and in Wilmington, Doug Barba, Doug’s son, Josh is their spokesperson. It was always pushing a car, always pushing a deal. And they’ve completely changed their thinking and now it’s about branding themselves. But going back to your point, when they’re doing their spot, all they’re thinking about is branding. And then if we’re going to spend 50% of it digitally, we still think we need to be on TV. So we’re taking some of that 50% of the digital and running it on CTV. So some people think, does that count as traditional because it’s a TV spot or does it count as digital?

Jim Fitzpatrick: It’s a good point.

Mark Sokal: That’s why we say 50% because to me it’s digital. To other people it’s a TV spot. It’s traditional. But I know if you’re sitting at home, which I do now and I get on my apple TV and I go to one of the apps and let’s say it’s direct TV now or whatever app, Fox News anything, CNN and I click on it. Now I could serve that ad to that person. That’s so strong. And I know I’m going to give you a report back that says [inaudible 00:24:15]

Jim Fitzpatrick: Like you said earlier, it’s all about the data.

Mark Sokal: It’s all about the data.

Jim Fitzpatrick: In this case you know that person that’s watching.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely. So going back to the first time buyer. That was big when I was selling cars 30 years ago, I’m sure it still is.

Jim Fitzpatrick: It’s still is.

Mark Sokal: So if we know that, that first time buyer is on their phone and does everything from their phone, including watching TV, my daughter watches the bachelor on TV, on the phone, not on the TV and I could hit her with a first time buyer spot.

I even think you can, at this point we have some clients, two clients that are actually making different spots to spending a little bit more in production. To make two or three different spots because we can hit the certain …Perfect example would be the Superbowl. We got a call directly from Yahoo.

=That said, we had a big cancellation and we’ve got these spots that you could buy and we got them, all my dealers for a really, really good price. Got to, whoever watched the super bowl on Yahoo saw their commercials. How strong is that? So now you can make a commercial that you know it’s just going to run during that.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Unbelievable, super bowl spot. Oh my God.

Mark Sokal: And now think about this. So a soup bowl spot nationally, you know how much those, cost millions and millions of dollars.

I could run that Super bowl spot on Yahoo Sports during the Super bowl, the average cost, the dealer was about 900 to 1000 dollars to run two spots.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Oh my gosh. Wow. And just for their market.

Mark Sokal: And I go out 30 miles of their market and I know who I’m hitting. Now. I could go to the dealer and say, “Here’s how many impressions you got. Here’s how many people saw it.” And it’s not a guess. It’s a factual stuff. Once we bring them to your website and they’re there, now that’s your customer. You can own those people. If you do it the right way. That doesn’t mean every 10 minutes, hitting them and upsetting them.

Jim Fitzpatrick: No. It doesn’t.

Mark Sokal: But one of the things I tell the dealers is we have on our website, price drop. So click here if the price drops and people will sign up for that. And when we first came out-

Jim Fitzpatrick: So if the price drops it communicates that immediately to the consumer, I’m looking at this car, it’s a Ford Mustang, it’s going for X. But if there’s a decrease, I’m going to be alerted.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Pretty cool. Yeah.

Mark Sokal: Soon as you click it, then you get one email that says, “We’ve signed you up at …” If this price drops you’ll get it. The dealership obviously gets that, it goes into their CRM. So at first the dealer would call immediately and say, “Hey, you’re looking for …” And that’s not the way we recommend to do it. If they’re notifying you for a price drop, they’re not buying it today. So I would wait two or three days, four days, and then call them and do your thing. Have the BBC call. But to jump on it immediately is probably not the right thing to do.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Right. I agree.

Mark Sokal: But it’s those things that when we have your website or not just Sokal but not the factory, that second site where you have a lot more control of exactly what you can hit the people with. And exactly, you see it all.

Jim Fitzpatrick: And it sounds like the team at Sokal kind of holds the dealer’s hands through that process and takes the burden off their backs. Right?

Mark Sokal: I think, you know it goes back again to when the advertising company would walk in when I was a dealer and say, “Okay, what do you want to do?”

Jim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. That’s just makes a dealer [inaudible 00:28:04]

Mark Sokal: Why do I have you? Why am I paying you? Right. We are trying to take all of that off of you so we can, now obviously we can’t price the car. But once you give us the prices and you put them in …

Jim Fitzpatrick: You can market it.

Mark Sokal: Now we’re doing our thing. I mean we’re going to do the banner, we’re going to do everything for you to market. You need to worry about desking a deal, selling cars, buying cars, doing your thing.

Jim Fitzpatrick: And that’s for the dealers that are watching. And that’s what they want. That’s what they want to hear.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely.

Jim Fitzpatrick: They know what they do best. And it’s not the digital side.

Mark Sokal: And I would say one thing that’s important, whether it’s Sokal or another agency, you need a full service agency.

There were a lot of new vendors coming out and that’s great. But they’re only doing one particular thing, and then the dealer has to work with 10 different people. Oh, he’s doing the production, he’s doing the digital, he’s doing the mail, he’s doing a print ad. He’s … You can’t have that.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Think it’s crazy.

Mark Sokal: And nothing’s ever going to match. It’s never going to get right. Get one agency, whoever that may be. And make sure that they can do everything that you do. And I have 150 people at our place and we have, there’s nothing we can’t do in-house.

Everything that we do is done in-house. And I think that’s what’s important and obviously the trust factor. You have to have that with your agency. Because you need to-

Jim Fitzpatrick: Otherwise you’re always second guessing.

Mark Sokal: You’re always … Right. You have to have that trust and you have to understand that they have your best interest. Because obviously the more cars they sell-

Jim Fitzpatrick: it’s a partnership.

Mark Sokal: It’s a partnership. I hate when they say, you’re a vendor. I don’t ever want to be a vendor.

Jim Fitzpatrick: No?

Mark Sokal: I want to be a partner, I want to be your friend. Most of my deals I’m [inaudible 00:30:00].

Jim Fitzpatrick: I know you have done a phenomenal job of cultivating your clients and it’s become kind of like a family. Once they come in, they’re in to stay, which I commend you on that because advertising agencies come and go so frequently in the retail auto space that, to have a roster of clients like you’ve had over the last 20 years, it’s just been very impressive.

Mark Sokal: Thank you. My father taught me growing up that, if you could feel your hand with five friends that are really your friends, you’ve lived a good life.

And I could tell you that I have three and all three of them are in the car business as our dealers. I mean it’s like that, that I want to be their friend because they could trust me. I don’t have a contract with one client. We don’t do contracts. Not One. I’m as good as I was last month. It’s car business.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Keeps you going.

Mark Sokal: But I could tell you this, I’ve lost a couple of handfuls out of hundreds-

Jim Fitzpatrick: That’s pretty good.

Mark Sokal: In 18 years, we don’t have turnover. Even our employees. It’s not something, you need again, full service agency, no matter who it is …

Jim Fitzpatrick: Turnkey.

Mark Sokal: Turnkey.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Yep.

Mark Sokal: Absolutely.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Well, Mark Sokal, founder and CEO of Sokal advertising, thank you so much for joining us. You are a breath of fresh air in the advertising arena because you come in with all of the good stuff that you come in with. I know the dealers right now that are watching are there making notes, CTV, and two sites. The fact that you guys handle it all at your agency, thumbs up to you. Great job.

Mark Sokal: Thank you.

Jim Fitzpatrick: And again, love to have you back in here in the next-

Mark Sokal: It’s always a pleasure seeing you.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Few weeks or every month. Come on in and we’ll catch up on advertising. Really appreciate it.

Mark Sokal: Cool. Thank you so much.

Jim Fitzpatrick: Thanks.

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