Local Performance Data Has Quietly Become Someone Else's Job

Somewhere along the way, OEM marketing strategy determined that local performance data belonged to the dealer. Nobody wrote that down. It happened through a series of transitions, one budget cycle at a time, until the org chart reflected it: national media, national creative, national reporting, and then a hard edge right where the dealer network starts.

The defense is fair: Dealers are closer to the buyer, they know their market, they have the relationships.

Then look at what a dealer actually has to work with. A two-rooftop operation does not employ an analyst. It employs a General Manager wearing four hats and a marketing coordinator who also writes the email newsletters. Nobody there is building a data-driven demand model for their territory. So the data gets generated every day, lands in five systems that don't talk to each other, and dies there. Meanwhile, the OEM tunes national media performance to the third decimal and calls that measurement.

A pontoon is not a center console.

Start with the part your dealers already beat you at.

In marine, the product and the use case change with the water. A buyer in Alabama shopping an aluminum bass boat for river and reservoir fishing has little in common with a buyer in Fort Lauderdale shopping a center console for offshore, or a family in Michigan looking at a pontoon. Three different stories, three different reasons to buy, three different sets of words that work. In categories like this, these audiences also become heavily correlated with specific geographic regions.

Powersports is worse, or better, depending on how you look at it. The same side-by-side sells as ranch equipment in west Texas, as a trail machine in Michigan, and as a dune toy in southern Utah. One unit, three buyers who would not recognize each other's version of the pitch.

Dealers get this right without trying, because they generally only live in one of those markets.

Here's the honest counterpoint. Broad reach has a real job, and a national campaign that tries to be locally specific everywhere ends up specific nowhere. I'd still argue most OEMs have overcorrected in an attempt to give clarity to the dealer’s role in the sale. You built the reach and began to develop brand preference with a prospect, then you handed it off to partners who are not designed with the right capacities to follow through with your expectations.

Foot traffic is a signal, not a scoreboard.

Here’s an example from back in 2024. Placer.ai put US retail foot traffic up 0.4% year over year. Fine. Underneath that, states ranged from Maine at +2.2% and North Dakota at +2.0% alongside plenty of markets that shrank. The national number described nobody.

If you are not measuring visits by location, you are guessing at where demand actually is. But measuring it badly is its own trap, and this is the part almost everyone gets wrong the first time.

Foot traffic is not sales traffic. A store with a strong service department and a busy parts counter shows steady weekday visits from people who bought two years ago and are not buying again this quarter. Read raw visit counts as demand and you will overweight that location while missing the small showroom that moves five units on a Saturday out of a shopping-heavy crowd. The fix is not complicated: Split service and parts activity from shopping activity using day of week, dwell time, and seasonality, or at minimum, estimate the service mix at each location before you adulterate the number into a forecast. A dealer with an aging service base can look like a growth market for a year before anyone notices.

Your dealers can run attribution. They just can't run yours.

I want to correct something that gets repeated in this conversation, including by me.

A dealer group with a competent marketing team (or agency) can absolutely do device-level attribution. Geofence the lot, match device exposure to visits, report on walk-ins from their own local campaigns. That capability is not exotic anymore, and plenty of larger groups have it.

What they cannot do is connect a walk-in back to the national awareness work that made your brand familiar eight months before the visit. They don't own that media, they don't see that exposure data, and they have no reason to model it. That connection only exists at the OEM level, and if you don't build it, it does not move the needle for either of you.

The cost of not building it is not abstract. The ANA's (Association of National Advertisers) programmatic transparency study found that of roughly $88 billion in open-web programmatic spend, about $22 billion was wasteful or unproductive, and only about $0.36 of every dollar entering a DSP reached an effective consumer. Now apply that to a campaign you are evaluating on click metrics because the walk-in is invisible to you. Targeting and audience development isn’t just the new terminology for persona work, it’s ROI work that keeps your advertising out of an advertising-waste study.

Inventory against opportunity, not inventory against target.

Most dealer performance reviews compare inventory to a target, and the target came from last year plus a number somebody in sales felt good about.

Opportunity is a different question. Retail sales by market, registrations, competitive share, service base, seasonality, market-condition factors, and what units actually moved at what price. Cross-section those and you can forecast where the next unit sells and price the marketing required to make it happen. Do it by market and your spend allocation stops being a fairness exercise across the dealer body and becomes a bet you can defend.

This is also where lead scoring starts to run out of road. Scoring tells you who raised their hand, while propensity modeling tells you who is likely to buy whether or not they've raised it. And in a distributed channel model, those two lists diverge a lot more than most people expect. That's a separate article, and it's coming.

What varies here is what data you can actually get. Commercial vehicle and equipment OEMs usually have registration, telematics, and fleet data available and underused. Marine and powersports OEMs are often working from warranty registrations, dealer-reported retail, and whatever the association publishes. Both are workable. Neither happens if you're waiting for a dealer to do the work and share an accurate demand forecast with you.

Pull one number this week.

For your ten largest markets, put last year's marketing spend next to last year's retail sales. Many OEMs can produce both nationally but aren’t actively monitoring it locally. And if you do get the columns built, check what the money actually said in each market. If Fort Lauderdale and Michigan got the same creative visuals and calls to action, you weren't strategically allocating spend against opportunity in those markets. The reality is that you were just distributing it across them and leaving your dealers to make up the difference with one hand tied behind their backs.