Stacey Coopes
CEO
Unite Digital, Bloomfield Hills
Employees: 95
Revenue: $100M+
Automotive manufacturers and their affiliated dealers may be separate companies, but most consumers don’t make that distinction when they explore buying a car.
People typically visit OEM websites, look at OEM social media channels, and engage in all kinds of ways with the manufacturers.
In her 12 years at FordDirect (which culminated in her becoming its CEO), Stacey Coopes worked on developing digital tools to help bridge the gap between the customer data Ford was accumulating and the dealerships that could use it to improve their sales and customer service performance.
But she saw an opportunity beyond the Ford universe, recognizing that OEMs and dealers across the industry could benefit from platforms that empowered the better use of customer data.
So, in 2016, following 13 years at FordDirect, Coopes decided to take a risk and invest her own capital in launching Unite Digital in Bloomfield Hills.
It’s been a rapid rise since she hit the ground in 2017. Today the company has surpassed $100 million in annual revenue, and has nearly 100 employees who serve both OEMs and dealerships.
Unite Digital’s clients include Mitsubishi and Stellantis, as well as many companies in their networks.
“We sit in the middle between the OEM and the dealers,” Coopes says. “We have technology that allows the integration of the franchise networks to work with an OEM’s digital marketing strategies.”
In essence, Unite Digital is allowing the dealerships not only to white-label the promotional efforts of their affiliated OEMs — incorporating their own names, messaging, URLs, and other custom details — but also to plug in the customer data, to ensure the delivery of the message is targeted and strategic.
Unite Digital also negotiates with vendors at scale, so each dealership’s costs reflect the volume of the larger OEM’s network, rather than having to pay higher rates that only reflect the individual dealer’s own volume.
As a result, dealers don’t need to spend time figuring out how to use the data to improve their strategies. Unite Digital applies it to their campaigns in such a way that it’s all done for them.
Another example of the technology’s use is letting customers know about the need to take a particular action with their vehicle.
“We take all the data from the OEM to know when the vehicle needs to be serviced, or any recall message from the OEM that needs to go right to the customer,” Coopes says.
“We send the right messages at the right time. All this data is just plugged into a third-party solution that we partner with, that can integrate the data and can provide us with an out-of-the-box solution for the dealer.”
The basis of the Unite Digital model is the idea that customers aren’t distinguishing between OEMs and dealers in their car-buying experience, and Coopes doesn’t think they should have to.
“When those two entities aren’t coordinated, it feels like you’re working with a very separate company,” Coopes says. “It doesn’t improve the brand experience, but as the technology gets better, customers are expecting this frictionless consumer experience.”
Some of the industry’s interest in the Unite Digital approach has come from the perceived threat from certain manufacturers — some in the U.S., but especially in Europe — trying to remove the dealer from the equation and sell directly to consumers.
That hasn’t worked well, Coopes says, because the manufacturers don’t really understand retail.
But it did show the OEMs they need to improve their coordination with dealers to make the sales operation as smooth as possible, and that starts with getting their customer data out of silos and getting it into the hands of the people who are actually dealing with the consumers.
When Coopes took the concept to market, she realized she needed to be able to show the other OEMs that Unite Digital had built something that understood their business models.
“We began to work on unique solutions that would allow us to be first in the market and show innovation,” she says.
“We did a program, for example, with Google where we were the first agency to take an OEM’s inventory and populate it on every dealer’s Google business profile. That project was unique in allowing us to gain traction with the OEM, and it had tremendous value because so many consumers go to the Google business profile but don’t actually go to the website.”
In the eight years since Coopes established Unite Digital, she has had to manage the transition from doing much of the work hands-on to training and empowering a full team.
That leadership experience has taught her a lot.
“You take something very small and figure out how to grow it,” Coopes says. “The key to that is how you evolve as a leader, because in the beginning you’re doing everything and running all parts of the business.
“You’re in every aspect of the proposals and the work that needs to get done in terms of financing and how the company is generating cash. And then, as you grow, the key is how do you bring on the right people that have the skill sets you need to take the company to the next level?”
Coopes decided she wanted a team of independent thinkers who could nevertheless align behind a common vision.
“There were already two big competitors in the market, so we had to do things faster and more nimbly, and that challenge really caused our team to gel,” Coopes says.
At 54, Coopes is finding satisfaction in the challenges and the triumphs, and is keeping her focus on achieving more. “As long as it’s fun, I want to stay,” she says.
