32% more clicks: How Ken Garff transformed Meta Automotive Inventory Ads with Phyron video

When Jordyn Canady first joined Ken Garff a decade ago, she wasn’t thinking about Meta Automotive Inventory Ads or lead funnels. She was thinking about writing.

“My background is actually in English, that’s what I studied in school,” she laughs. “I did a lot of writing-based jobs, and when I came to Ken Garff, I was hired to write social posts.”

At the time, paid social was hardly a priority.

“We weren’t really focusing on paid social at all,” she recalls. “Occasionally we’d run one campaign, even though we already had about 50 dealerships nationwide.”

Ten years later, everything looks a lot different.

As Ken Garff expands, their Meta Automotive Inventory Ads face new demands

Ken Garff now operates nearly 70 dealerships across nine states and represents almost every major automotive brand. Along the way, paid social has become one of the organisation’s most powerful growth engines.

“As you know, social media changes all the time – like weekly almost,” Jordyn says. “Now paid is our main focus on social.”

And at the heart of that strategy sits Meta’s Automotive Inventory Ads. The automotive-specific version of Meta Catalog Ads, designed to dynamically pull real-time vehicle inventory into paid social.

“We use the Meta Catalog Ads all the time,” Jordyn says. “If a store has a low budget, that’s the single campaign we recommend they start with. They’re extremely important to us, especially because the catalog updates itself. We don’t have to manually go in and remove cars once they’ve sold.”

However, one thing was becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Cost per lead was under pressure.

“When our cost per leads start to really rise and get really expensive, that’s not a good use of our advertising dollars,” she says. “We watch those numbers like hawks.”

Jordyn knew they needed something more to help those Meta Catalog Ads stand out.

Video offers an answer… but not without a production challenge

The more Jordyn looked at the landscape, the clearer it became that video was the solution. Meta was pushing harder into video, and Jordyn could see how important it had become across the industry. Their Meta Catalog Ads performed well, but they didn’t always feel engaging enough, and the team kept asking how to make them more “eye-catching” and “thumb-stopping.”

“At most, what we could do in Meta was a slideshow of the inventory photos,” she explains. “It just wasn’t enough. Video has continued to blow up and become such an important part of social media strategies. Even just having video alone in the Meta Catalog Ads would be a huge improvement.”

But unfortunately, creating the extra video content required wasn’t simple. Even with Ken Garff’s big, capable marketing department of more than forty people, Jordyn knew the video workload was far beyond what the specialists could take on.

The creative team included around ten people, with three or four focused on video, and they were already responsible for monthly TV ads and internal content. Even with a strong, experienced creative team in place, the reality was one of capacity. There was simply no room to produce individual videos for hundreds of vehicles across dozens of dealerships.

They knew video was what audiences wanted. And they could see Meta nudging advertisers in the same direction, favoring video formats with better reach and engagement. They just couldn’t make it happen manually across an operation this big.

The email that changed everything

In late 2024, just as the pressure around creative was intensifying, an unexpected email changed the conversation.

Jordyn’s digital director forwarded her a message from the Phyron team showcasing the Paid Ads product, and it didn’t take long for both of them to see there was something different about it. Inside were sample videos generated using real Ken Garff inventory, and they looked nothing like the slideshow-based assets the team had been limited to before.

“It really caught his eye,” Jordyn says. “We’re always asking ourselves, ‘How can we make these Meta Catalog Ads more engaging?’ And these videos looked… honestly, really eye-catching.”

The difference was instant and obvious. These weren’t generic templates, they were real, dynamic, branded videos built around their own inventory.

“We’re always looking for ways to make our ads feel more ‘thumb-stopping,’ and this finally looked like something that could do that,” Jordyn says.

More importantly, Phyron’s Paid Ads solution unlocked something the team had never had before. It finally gave them the ability to produce video content at a scale that simply wasn’t possible manually. For a group managing thousands of active vehicles with only three or four video specialists, that shift made a huge difference.

“We could never have produced this volume of content manually,” Jordyn explains. “This replaced work that simply wasn’t possible for us to do.”

32% more clicks, lower lead costs and hundreds of hours saved

The experience with the Phyron team during onboarding only strengthened Jordyn’s confidence.

“We loved working with the team,” she says. “Every change we requested, whether it was a color tweak, a brand requirement or something specific to a dealership, nothing was ever an issue. Even with the time differences, it was surprisingly easy.”

With the setup complete and early Paid Ads creative looking strong, the team selected eight dealerships to begin a live pilot. And it didn’t take long for the impact to show, especially in the numbers that mattered most.

Across the first eight pilot stores, Phyron’s automated video ads delivered:

✔ A 32.2% increase in click-through rate (CTR), a lift Jordyn says “rarely happens” in automotive paid social.

✔ Up to 22.9% lower cost per lead (CPL), with an average decrease of 4.69% across stores. Even as industry-wide lead costs increased.

✔ Huge time savings, eliminating a workload that would take hundreds of hours. At 45–60 minutes per video, manually creating ads for hundreds of fast-changing vehicles wasn’t realistic. Phyron automates the whole thing and refreshes the creative for hundreds of cars in under an hour.

“A lot of the time when we test new ideas, performance actually gets worse,” Jordyn says. “So seeing CPL go down was really encouraging.”

The higher CTR confirmed what the team hoped the creative would achieve.

“To us, that shows people are spending more time on the site,” she explains. “It tells us the ads are more engaging.”

Even as their own website changes made lead capture more challenging across the board, the Phyron-powered ads continued to perform strongly and improved over time.

And when people inside the organisation started seeing the new ads in the wild, demand spread quickly. “Now we’re onboarding nine more stores,” Jordyn says.

Staying ahead with smarter, scalable creative

Over a matter of months, Phyron helped Ken Garff roll out high-quality video ads across eight dealerships and counting. The result was a higher click-through rate and lower cost per lead, without adding more work for the creative team.

With hundreds of vehicles changing all the time, that’s not an easy thing to do. As Jordyn puts it, creating video manually at that scale “would never actually happen.”

It’s also an especially big challenge with Meta’s Automotive Inventory Ads, where results are closely watched and teams are under constant pressure to keep ads fresh.

But for Jordyn, one of the most meaningful outcomes of the Phyron rollout wasn’t just the improved metrics. It was what the shift represented for her team.

“At Ken Garff, our general managers always want to know if we’re ahead of the curve,” she says. “With Phyron, we felt like we could say yes.”

That combination of automated production, high-quality creative, and measurable performance gave the marketing team a renewed sense of confidence and pride. For dealer groups facing similar scale and performance pressures, that combination can be hard to find.

Ultimately, Jordyn’s advice to other dealerships is simple.

“We’re using technology that’s cutting-edge. I would definitely recommend jumping on with Phyron.”