TruckCentral.com
TruckCentral
CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION NOT TO BE FORWARDED TO ANY OTHER PARTY OR REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF TANNER POWELL
Tanner Powell 4600 W Guadalupe B107 Austin, TX 78751 m (817) 437-5177 | thetannerpowell@gmail.com
Mission Statement To create the most visually compelling, well organized, comprehensive, and cost-effective online truck listing browsing and publishing platform in the industry. By leveraging the latest design and technology at a dramatically competitive price point, our goal is to change the landscape of truck listings going forward.
Market Analysis - “Timing is Everything” Truckers The internet has already revolutionized much of the way many industries conduct business. The trucking industry is behind this curve, mostly due to technology pricepoints and broadband availability. With the emergence of affordable portable netbooks ($400 vs $1200 and up as of only a few years ago) and wireless speeds that make casual browsing possible (3G), the technological landscape of the trucking industry is about to open up like never before. Social networking (Twitter, Brightkite, etc) is already proving instrumental to technology uptake among the niche culture of truckers. In a rather isolated job with large amounts of downtime, the rewards of connecting with others have spurred new incentives to overcome the hurdles of learning new skills. To more and more truckers the internet is no longer an intimidating unknown but a tool they’re comfortable connecting with.
Advertisers Print is a dying medium. Fewer and fewer are willing to pay more for yesterday’s information in a static format that wastes resources. The future is about current information, the ability to search, and choice. The newspaper industry is a bellwether for the future of print advertising. The following statistics reflect a dated and vulnerable pricing structure as much as outdated technology: • Newspaper stocks fell an average of 83.3% in 2008—twice the fall of the S&P 500—wiping out $64.5 billion in market value, according to Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog. • Since 1994—and the release of the commercial web browser—newspaper audience penetration has fallen a third, from 23% to 16%. In that time, circulation fell 14% (59 million to 50 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America) while population rose 20%. • Viewership for network evening news continues to decline, to 23.1 million in 2007, according to Nielsen. The median age of network evening news viewers is 61 in 2008, according to Magna Global USA. • Since 1994, newspaper print advertising revenue fell on an inflation-adjusted basis by 10% (from $34,109 million in 1994 dollars to $42,209 million in 2007 dollars, says NAA). •In 2008 alone, 15,586 newspaper jobs were lost, according to the Papercuts blog. • In 2008, the Pew Research Center found that the internet surpassed newspapers as a primary source of news for Americans (following TV). For young people, 18 to 29, the internet will soon surpass TV, at nearly double the rate for newspapers. • Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future found in a 2007 survey that young people 12 to 25 will “never read a newspaper.” Never.
Truck advertising entities that maintain a print presence rely on that revenue to survive, and have little incentive to innovate online as it would only serve to detract from their main source of revenue. This phenomenon is largely why newspapers were so timid to put serious effort into their online presences early on, and also why many are the brink of closure today. Change is painful, which is why so little innovation has occurred in truck advertising.
How to differentiate
“If you can’t measure it, then you can’t improve it.” We want to offer, out of the box, unparalleled analytics for activity on dealer listings. When you empower dealers with information, they’re able to act on that information and adjust a poor listing or learn from effective ones.
more pixels = more content The smaller box represents the standard screen resolution at the beginning of the decade. In our research, the overwhelming majority of our existing competitors’ sites were built upon these legacy web standards. We want to bring listings to up to speed, presenting search criteria in a much more clean and digestible fashion and dealer’s photographs in all the glory that modern web design allows. More focused content spread across a greater area will make for a much more palatable navigation experience.
OLD NEW
Paradigm Shift There are a number of premium services we’re planning to introduce, but even if our pricing structure were to move slightly upward it will never begin to approach the amount a typical dealership is currently used to paying. This is the essence of what the internet has done for commerce. This is dramatic. Our competitors are not going to like us.
Anticipated yearly Spend with TruckCentral.com
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