AR’s 25th: Q&A with publisher Bill Zadeits

There are neat stacks of documents on the round table in his office — all cookie-crumbs of preparation as the Auto Remarketing publisher readies himself for another Used Car Week, just six days away.

It’s the magazine’s signature event, and as conference chair, Zadeits is the football coach of this operation.

As he would say, it’s the fourth quarter and the team is moving closer to running its two-minute drill.

Zadeits has just finished meeting with two of his coordinators, so to speak, to put the finishing touches on the game plan for emceeing the conference.

One of them (yours, truly) sticks around to talk with Zadeits about another momentous occasion in the magazine’s history: its 25th Anniversary.

He has been around for the lion’s share of those two-and-a-half decades, having joined the company in the early days of Auto Remarketing. And that’s where our conversation — part of Auto Remarketing's Dec. 1 issue, our 25th Anniversary editon —  begins.

Joe Overby: First edition of Auto Remarketing, which of course, was called Used Car Merchandising at the time, comes out in 1991. So, where was a young Bill Zadeits in early 1991?

Bill Zadeits: Gosh … early 1991, I was working as a news and sports reporter at WCHL AM radio in Chapel Hill. And so I had an on-air shift from 9 to 2, I believe, or 9 to 1. They had music and everything on AM radio at the time, and so I’d play music, and then at the top of the hour and the bottom of the hour, I would do news and sports and weather … and then in the afternoons, my job was to go over to a different location where the Tar Heel Sports Network offices were.

Basically, I was a production guy and also anchored their scoreboard reports. So I was arranging all of these scoreboard reporters from different locations and putting together my reports … (and also) helping at the time, Woody Durham — who was the play-by-play guy — and Mick Mixon, who now does the (Carolina) Panthers, was the color analyst.

And I was the third guy on that team. I would spend my morning doing AM radio, spinning tunes, and doing news, hyper-local stuff. And in the afternoon, my job was making sure that either Tar Heel football, basketball or baseball was ready to go.

I also did, at the time, with WCHL, I did women’s basketball for the Tar Heels. They ended up winning the national championship after I left, of course. And I also did (play by play at) Chapel Hill High School football … I was a busy boy, no doubt. It was fun.

JO: Having the experience covering sports on the radio and later on television down in Wilmington (N.C.) for the local NBC affiliate — and now you’ve been a part of a publication covering the automotive business for 20-plus years — what are some parallels that you’ve found between covering sports like you did in the past and the past 20 years covering the auto business?

BZ: There’s no doubt, I think, competition is the common thread there. It is so competitive … in the automotive industry, you find a lot of people who played sports in high school and a lot in college, even.

In athletics, you have to be very disciplined, you have to be very smart, you have to have a strategy, you have to be willing to work. You have to put the work in to get the work out. And I think that the automotive industry is the same way. It’s a grind. It is all day, every day. And there are a lot of people who are just so competitive. They want to win.

And winning is a little different, what the end result is. But I think that is one of ties that bind them; it is very competitive. And when you have companies that are teams that are competing, it really does bring out the best in everyone. And I think that’s one of the things I can say about being on the periphery of the automotive industry and on the periphery of the sports world, you can really see that those people that really are the smartest and work the hardest, they end up winning.

JO: You made the transition from working in TV to coming aboard at Auto Remarketing in 1996, so when you joined here, tell us about those early days.

BZ: Man, Joe, it was interesting. I was the fourth person. There was (publisher emeritus) Ron (Smith), there was our business manager and there was a graphic designer, and that was it.

We had freelance and outsourced people that handled all of our content. Ron and I would go and meet monthly with our top writer at Chick-fil-A. And we would lay out all of the editorial stuff and we’d have a Chick-fil-A lunch and then that would be it. He would just turn it in after that.

It was a fun time. It was an exciting time … We could taste, or at least smell, the opportunity. We didn’t know what it was yet. But we knew that there was an opportunity in this niche.

Used cars were really becoming more and more popular. The technology and the companies in and around it were becoming more and more mature. The processes were becoming just more stringent. So, we knew that that quality of what a used vehicle was was changing to something better.

And with the price points alone, the consumers would move toward it. And if consumers moved toward it, we knew dealers were going to move toward it.

And so whether they were independent dealers or franchised dealers, we felt like we had an opportunity to really provide them with some great content, some great data, some great analysis, some best practices — all of those things — to help them sell more used cars.

And that remains what we do today. We want to provide content and information to these people and businesses to help them sell more used cars.

So, it was a fun time. You wore a lot of hats. There was no voicemail, there was no Internet when we first started — at least in our offices at the time. So I answered phones, I took messages and stuff like that … it was a lot of fun, but it was very different.

We had a 10-time-a-year magazine, 8.5” by 11”. And it was just a very different workflow than what we have today.

JO: So, what aspects of the magazine’s evolution during your tenure stand out to you?

BZ: When you go back to the very beginning, I think that the move from 10 issues to 12 issues was a commitment. We’re going to cover this every month. And so that was big. Shortly after that, we began to dabble a little bit in conferences.

We would be invited to be a co-sponsor of another conference or something like that. And as we participated in those, we saw that, man, there could really be an opportunity for us in that area, as well, to become a thought leader and provide that venue for people.

We went through a period where we were publishing Auto Remarketing in an 8.5” by 11” 12-times-(a-year) glossy magazine and we decided that we were also going to do something called Auto Remarketing Weekly, which meant every week, obviously.

And that was the precursor of what we have today, but it was a great learning curve. Because our work flow changed tremendously. The type of stories that we were writing changed from a lot of feature-type of content to weekly news, because the Internet was first coming on board. We had a website, just as a holder.

We started Auto Remarketing Today as kind of like a daily news update. And so when you have the magazine, a weekly and a website, all of a sudden we just found ourselves just going crazy with it. And it was great.

The Internet was great. It really allowed us to reach a lot of people and I think it helped tremendously. Auto Remarketing Today was a tremendous move to help us build our brand, because we were there every morning with news and pertinent, relevant content for the industry.

Eventually the monthly magazine and the (weekly) newspaper, kind of merged into the oversized Auto Remarketing that you see today — 24 times a year, twice a month — so that we could do both of those things; we could still cover news as needed and we could still move toward the feature aspect and different things of that nature.

But that was huge to make that commitment: on 24 times a year and oversized, which was a new size for us, and become a news magazine.

You think about that evolution of the media, the digital aspect of it with the enewsletters and the website and the events. Really getting into the events was a big, big deal for us.

JO: Likewise, I imagine that being here for 20-plus years, there have been some memorable moments working with the magazine, special issues, conferences, partnerships. Any memories stand out to you from the past 20 years?

BZ: Definitely. When we first started with the conferences, our thought was not so much a broad scope that brought a lot of people in … it was a very narrow cast. What if we had a conference with 50 to 100 people on lease-end remarketing?

And so we did that for a little while and soon began to learn that, really, we needed larger-scale events.

One of them that we had was an event that at the time was leading-edge but has kind of become the mainstream. And it was called iRemarketing.

And a lot of things back in the early 2000s were focused on, “how’s the digital aspect going to impact remarketing? Will online remarketing totally replace the physical auction and that type of thing?” 

We had an event in Chicago on September 10, 11 and 12 of 2001.

We opened the conference that morning of September 11 and people were having breakfast and so forth. And we started to hear the news of the World Trade Center attack, or something going on in New York.

We began to filter in and people were watching TV. We started with the conference because we had no idea what was going on, but we soon realized that something very serious was happening. So we rolled the TV into the room. We heard that flights were being cancelled and lot of our people had obviously traveled to Chicago.

We had a flip-board with magic markers and we were matching people up with rides — people going to Indianapolis, people going to Atlanta, people going to California were getting cars.

We had a gentleman that at the time was working with Enterprise and they had a lot of rental vehicles that had been checked in at one of the Chicago auto auctions. And he made a big effort and actually got our staff a 15-passenger van. So, we drove out of Chicago that day just absolutely shocked at the day that had happened. Everyone’s scared. Everyone thought that Chicago could be the next target … it was scary, it really was.

But I think that (everyone coming together) was an amazing moment. Thankfully, we all got home OK.

And then coming out of that conference, a lot of hotels had a lot of availability in January, February and March, because people had cancelled everything with the fear of terrorist attacks in the United States, fear of flying … We stepped out and I give Ron all the credit for it. He signed a contract right out of that, in that aftermath, to do an event in February at the Bellagio, which was open … and we actually did what in essence was our first National Remarketing Conference back in February of 2002. That success of that 2002 conference was a turning point for the company, particularly given the business and sales environment of the time.

JO: As a magazine publisher, why is it important for you to have conferences and have events as part of your strategy beyond what’s in the print magazine? And what are some ways that having Used Car Week and its conferences have benefitted Auto Remarketing?

BZ: I think that over the course of time media has really changed in some respects. You really do have to be able to offer content to your readers in whatever venue they want to read it, whether it’s in Auto Remarketing, whether it’s in an enewsletter format, whether it’s on their handheld device.

And I think that conferences, in particular, take that content and bring it to life. One of the things that we do is, we provide that human expertise in the industry.

You’re an expert in your field, (SubPrime Auto Finance News senior editor) Nick (Zulovich) is an expert in his field. However, there are people who study it all day long, whether they’re economists or whether they’re analysts or presidents of companies … we provide that access to human expertise.

And to be able to have that in the live environment, where we can interact, where we can build a relationship, I think is critical.

As humans, we’re kind of wired to have relationships with other humans. Especially in the remarketing industry and used-car industry, it’s one of those industries, in particular, where relationships are so important. And that’s what our conferences do.

JO: You shared a little bit about the origins of the National Remarketing Conference, which eventually has become the anchor of Used Car Week. And now we’re six days out from this year’s Used Car Week.

Going into this year’s conference, what are some of the areas you’ve seen our conferences grow the most and what are some of the ways that those have changed over the past 15-20 years?

BZ: Obviously, CPO is a big segment of the retail space and of the wholesale space, too … I feel like we own the CPO segment and that’s been a goal from the very beginning: to cover it and promote it and to promote the industry … And I think that we’ve seen that evolve and grow and change in a number of really positive ways.

Adding the subprime element to it makes sense. We do such a good job in the subprime categories, not only in our SubPrime media but also the off shoot of that, the buy here, pay here media property as well.

And to be able to team with the National Automotive Finance Association for something like that is huge. To team with the NIADA is a big shot in the arm for us. The IARA on the remarketing side, and of course the NAAA is a great partnership. Amazing things going on there. We’re very honored to be co-locating and teaming with the NAAA.

Those things have all grown and added value to the event. And we knew that if we could package them all together in a relatively short window of time, we’d have the opportunity for people to attend more than one, if they chose to. Or to just attend one. Those are things that I think have really improved Used Car Week.

The repossessions side of things was a niche that really wasn’t getting a lot of attention. We dabbled in it a little bit with the National Remarketing Conference, but we really didn’t have the time to devote to it. But it really is, it’s totally worthy, the Re3 portion of (Used Car Week).

I think all of those coming together has been the secret sauce to success for us, and allowing different aspects of the industry to come together in a way that they cannot in any other venue.

JO: I did have one more question for you. I know that you regularly volunteer as high school sports PA announcer, and in honor of the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series, if you were a baseball player, Bill, what would your walk-up song be?

BZ: Oh my gosh, that’s a great question. I think it would have to be “We Ready” (by Archie Eversole).

JO: “We Ready,” alright! That’s a good one. It gets you fired up for the plate.

Not that this publisher — this coach, many would say — needs any motivation to be fired up for work.