NADA and The Cobalt Group Announce Successful Completion of Six-Year Partnership; NADA's Exclusive Endorsement of Cobalt Website Packages for NADA Member Dealers Resulted in Rapid Adoption of Internet Technology by Auto Dealers

Business Wire, Nov 22, 2005

SEATTLE & WASHINGTON -- The National Automobile Dealers Association and The Cobalt Group, North America's leading provider of automotive marketing services, today announced the successful completion of their exclusive six-year endorsement relationship aimed at helping the nation's automotive retailers adopt fully functional websites as a primary component of their retailing strategy. Cobalt is the only automotive retailing solutions provider to ever be endorsed by NADA.

"In 2000, more than 25 percent of the new-car dealers in the United States didn't have websites," says NADA Chief Information Officer Dick Malaise. "Thousands of other dealers had websites that were little more than online billboards with no real functionality for capturing leads and driving customers through the sales process. Now, as a direct result of this endorsement, 98 percent of dealers in the U.S. have built websites and are competing online."

Today the vast majority of the nation's automotive dealers are doing business online; retailing vehicles; using software-based customer relationship management (CRM) tools to help them capture, sort and follow up with prospects and customers; and leveraging the Internet as a powerful marketing channel.

"Cobalt had the foresight to recognize that dealers would continue to be the primary retailer of cars in the new Internet economy," says NADA President Phil Brady. "Their market leadership, technical innovation and dealer support made them the obvious choice for NADA."

"NADA saw very clearly where the future was heading," says John Holt, president and CEO of The Cobalt Group. "They knew a well-placed endorsement would help get dealers online and in the game. Cobalt is very proud that our endorsement with NADA helped make that happen. This relationship has been a tremendous success story. Together, NADA and Cobalt have achieved a very ambitious goal."

Cobalt will continue to provide thousands of NADA members with dynamic websites and lead management applications that help them attract more website traffic, drive more leads, close more sales, and market more effectively to their existing customer base. The relationships that grew out of NADA's endorsement of Cobalt are ongoing.

As for the future of automotive retailing technology, Holt says, "As far as we've come, this is really just the beginning and the possibilities are tremendous. Search engine optimization will help online dealerships to be even more competitive; CRM technology continues to uncover extraordinary new revenue opportunities; and inventory search capabilities are getting more and more sophisticated and customer-friendly -- which means higher profits for those dealers who stay on the cutting edge."

About NADA

The National Automobile Dealers Association, founded in 1917 and based in McLean, Virginia, represents more than 20,000 franchised new car and truck dealers holding nearly 43,000 separate franchises, domestic and international.

About The Cobalt Group

The Cobalt Group is North America's leading provider of automotive marketing services. For more than a decade, Cobalt's exclusive mission has been to help automobile dealers and manufacturers increase their retailing effectiveness and profits. Cobalt provides marketing services to more than half the automotive dealerships in the United States, Canada and Mexico and is endorsed by more than two-thirds of the world's major automotive manufacturers. Cobalt is endorsed by the American International Automobile Dealers Association (AIADA) and the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA(R)).