Dan Marino looses 22lbs?

It’s hard enough to compete with all the other dealers on AutoTrader, now I have to compete with Dan Marino loosing 22lbs?

I find these non automotive related ads to be annoying. But, I’m sure they’re making the money from it.

Here’s another gripe. I pay big money for the Partner Listing with AutoTrader. This package includes top placement for my Mercedes-Benz inventory listings, it gets me additional photos, the notorious “Dealer Search” feature, and a rotating banner ad in the Mercedes-Benz search results. However, after doing several searches I started to take notice that the only banner ads I was seeing were for “Land Rover”..over and over and over again. So..I thought I would see how many refreshes it would take before my dealers banner ad showed up. It took 73! Amongst that I bet I saw the other Mercedes Partner dealers banner ad about the same amount as mine. The rest were for Land Rover.

I bet Land Rover is paying big money to have their banner ads to rotate (and having a permanent banner ad on the right) throughout the Mercedes-Benz search results. Apparently enough money to bump out the Partnering Mercedes dealers from the normal rotation.

Could this be a double edged sword for AutoTrader? I’m sure they hard sell this ad space to competing manufacturers and figure most dealers won’t pay attention to it anyways. I’m paying attention and I don’t really like it. Then again, maybe Mercedes-Benz had their opportunity to buy this ad space and didn’t do so. Either way..the Partnering Dealer banner ads should receive equal rotation.