DIGITAL LANE

A local entrepreneur helps auto dealers create commercials in-house.

BY R.J. KING

Lane Fortinberry grew up working at his father’s Chrysler Jeep dealership in Clarkston, where he learned every aspect of the business. After graduating from Northwood University in Midland, he was ready to take over the operation once his dad retired — but his life took some unexpected turns that paved the way to an entrepreneurial journey.

During Chrysler’s 2009 bankruptcy, the Fortinberrys’ dealership was one of 700-plus locations that were closed as part of the government-controlled proceedings. During the same week, the family learned a former business associate and used car broker had embezzled nearly $1 million to start a company to convert minivans for wheelchair use.

“Not a fun week,” Fortinberry says. “We promptly sued and seized all assets from that company and moved it into our dealership building in Clarkston, and started converting minivans for wheelchair use within a couple months.”

At the same time, Fortinberry began moonlighting as a social media marketer for a few local car dealers in Detroit. Two years later, in 2012, he received a message from a recruiter on LinkedIn saying that the recently formed Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (today Stellantis) was looking to fill a newly created digital marketing manager position. After interviewing at the automaker’s Chicago office, he was offered the job on the spot.

“It was at FCA that I got to work very closely with a few folks at Google on a regular basis, and 18 months later I ended up applying and getting hired to go work at Google,” Fortinberry recalls. “I literally could barely breathe when the recruiter called me one Friday afternoon in the winter of 2013.”

Working at Google’s local offices in Birmingham and Detroit, he saw firsthand how automakers spend billions of dollars in advertising each year. In addition, over the next seven years, he learned how the largest automotive dealership groups went to market with their advertising programs.

“From those two experiences, one thing became

INSIDE OUT

Lane Fortinberry, founder of Formatic Digital in Clarkston, took his experiences working with a dealership, an automaker, and Google and created a digital ad platform. very clear: There was a large disconnect between the priorities of the OEMs, who fund much of the dealership digital marketing that gets executed, and the priorities of the dealers themselves,” Fortinberry says. “The dealers all wanted to innovate in the areas of mobile and video, but they were handcuffed to ‘preferred partners’ that executed their digital media, often with little to no customer service and almost no idea of what their actual ROI was on the money that was being spent.”

After a year of hearing dealers complain about not having any good video options and not being able to properly measure their advertising effectiveness across myriad online tools, Fortinberry launched Formatic Digital in Clarkston in early 2021.

The company delivers digital ads across all of Google’s platforms — search, YouTube, display ads, Gmail, and more — and leverages artificial intelligence to optimize the ads using data from advanced measurement systems put in place for clients.

“We also solved a problem that dealers had by creating a nationwide team of actors and videographers who can be in any dealership in the country within a week, shooting high-quality video content that outperforms all of the ‘templated’ ads with payments or rebates being pushed by the OEM ‘preferred vendors,’ ” he says. “Essentially, we’ve become the local TV crew for the entire country.”

Today, Formatic Digital has multiple dealership clients in three states. The company recently signed a large corporate client that provides services, warranty, and financing products to car dealerships nationwide. “I’m most proud that I was able to do all of this and keep it in metro Detroit,” Fortinberry says.

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