September 3rd 2026 – US auto retailers are still struggling to scale video across live vehicle listings, despite growing pressure on marketing teams to produce more digital content across more channels.
The findings come from a nationwide survey of 250 Chief Marketing Officers and Digital Marketing Leads in US auto retail, commissioned by automated video company Phyron. Respondents said that, on average, only 38% of their live vehicle listings currently include a video asset.
The results point to a gap between content demand and production capacity. Video has become the most important format across digital advertising, paid social, dealer websites and vehicle merchandising, but many retailers are still unable to produce video at inventory scale.
For dealer marketing teams, the issue is the practical challenge of creating accurate, brand-safe and up-to-date content for every vehicle, across every channel, without adding more manual work.
“Dealers understand the value of video. The problem is scaling it,” says Mattias Kellquist, CEO and co-founder at Phyron. “Vehicle inventory changes constantly, and every car needs content that is accurate, consistent and ready to publish. That is very hard to manage manually.”
“Marketing teams are already under pressure to create more content, across more platforms, with the same resources. AI becomes useful when it removes that production bottleneck and helps teams create video at the speed auto retail now requires.”
One dealer group already seeing the impact is Ken Garff, which operates nearly 70 dealerships across nine states. As paid social became a core acquisition channel, the group wanted to make its Meta Automotive Inventory Ads more engaging, but producing video manually across fast-changing inventory was not realistic.
After introducing Phyron video across eight pilot dealerships, Ken Garff saw a 32.2% increase in click-through rate and up to a 22.9% reduction in cost per lead. The pilot also removed a workload that would have required hundreds of hours of manual production, with Phyron automating and refreshing creative for hundreds of cars in under an hour.
“We could never have produced this volume of content manually,” said Jordyn Canady, Social Media Manager at Ken Garff. “This replaced work that simply wasn’t possible for us to do.”
Video remains a scale problem
Car retailers now need content for more digital touchpoints than ever before. A single vehicle may need to appear across the dealer website, third-party listings, paid social campaigns, email marketing and customer follow-up.
Static imagery is still widely used, but video can give customers a clearer view of each vehicle and help dealers create more engaging inventory content. The challenge is that manual video production does not fit the pace of retail inventory.
Each vehicle may have different images, specifications, finance messages, branding rules and retailer offers. As stock changes, content also needs to change. For larger dealer groups, that can turn video production into a constant operational burden.
Phyron’s survey suggests this is where AI is starting to have the clearest role in auto retail marketing: not replacing teams, but helping them deal with content volumes that are too slow and repetitive to manage manually.
“This is not about making one good video,” adds Kellquist. “It is about making video possible for every vehicle, without asking marketing teams to do hours of repetitive production work. That is the practical use case for AI in auto retail.”
Phyron works with over 4,000 dealer customers across 35 countries, helping them save time and money while improving customer engagement. Since January 2021, its customers’ automated videos have generated more than 500 million views.
