Hamish Stone, a long-time marketplace executive at companies like Marktplaats and ICar Asia, has been named CEO at Bridebook, a wedding-planning app based in the U.K.

Stone (above) became CEO earlier this month after serving as COO of Bridebook for two-and-a-half years.

He spent almost three years at Marktplaats, when it was owned by EBay, first as director of the automotive segment and later as director of automotive and verticals, from 2013-2016. He then went to iCar Asia, which is based in Kuala Lumpur, from 2016 through 2022. He was managing director and CEO at iCar Asia, which was publicly traded for a time on the Australian Securities Exchange.

Hyundai North America CEO Jose Munoz told dealers Saturday that an Amazon employee in Seattle, where the ecommerce giant is based, was the first buyer in the test. A total of 18 Hyundai dealers in major markets are participating.

Munoz told Automotive News that NADA (the National Association of Auto Dealers) was working with Hyundai on the Amazon project “because they see this is happening in the industry.” “It’s not a one-dealer or two-dealers or one franchise, this is an evolution of the sales in the industry.”

The project was announced in November.

Munoz said that a group of dealers was working to identify potential problems. “The customer was extremely pleased with the way the process went,” he said.

“The whole point is to ensure that a much more seamless, straightforward, transparent, faster process is applied to the sale of a vehicle, and I’m much more positive, more confident now than I was a month ago.”

The Sphere is a “wow.” Supposedly visible from space, and active day and night, it manages to dominate the Las Vegas skyline even though there are so many other signs, lights, buildings and spectacular scenes that grab your eye in Sin City. (And they were considering putting up another Sphere in AIM Group Principal Jonathan Turpin’s hometown, London, but they just canceled it.)

The picture above says it all. Wow.

“We are short people,” said Adam Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Hireology, an ATS provider that focuses primarily on the automotive industry. “It’s never going to get better. The demographic trough we’re going to hit in the next 10 years … — this is a structural labor challenge.”

Robinson spoke at the Automotive News Retail Forum, an all-day session prior to the NADA conference. He was on a panel with Sherry Schultz, EVP and CHRO of the Walser Auto Group, a group of 25 dealerships in Minnesota and Kansas. Like most, Robinson and Schultz said there are no easy fixes.

Schultz said her company is shifting to a four-day work week when possible, giving its general managers and employees as much flexibility as possible. She said it has been “really, really critical” in improving staffing.

Robinson said dealerships should take care of their employees: “We can’t control interest rates. We can’t control gas prices. … We can control how we treat people.”

The complex is on the northern side of The Strip — i.e. Las Vegas Boulevard — near the Las Vegas Convention Center, where the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) is meeting this week. (Super Bowl Sunday is Feb. 11, while the NADA conference ends Feb. 4.) Resorts World is less than a mile from the convention center West Hall as the crow flies; it’s a one-mile walk because of the twists and turns. NADA takes up the West and North Halls of the massive facility. The signage is visible both from the convention center and the Strip.

A couple of years ago, we estimated Cox Automotive Group spent $10 million on its presence at NADA. Here’s betting this display adds a few large to the total!

]]> https://aimgroup.com/2024/01/25/newmark-adds-10-million-at-cuny-j-school/ Thu, 25 Jan 2024 21:23:36 +0000 https://aimgroup.com/?p=484231 There’s an endless debate about whether Craig Newmark and Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds — for the record, we don’t think so — but he’s definitely doing some good in other aspects of journalism.

Newmark announced today that he’s donating another $10 million to the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY) so that half of the student body can attend tuition-free next year. The school’s goal is to be entirely tuition-free by 2026.

In 2018, Newmark donated $20 million to the school, which was named in his honor — raising some serious questions and discussions about his impact on newspapers and journalism. By now, those questions have mostly subsided, and Newmark’s additional gift certainly won’t hurt.

“Tuition-free means more seriously good journalism education for students from all income backgrounds,” Newmark wrote on LinkedIn. “CUNY … [has] helped New Yorkers, many who grew up like me without a lot of money, get good jobs and get into the middle class and better. … Turns out that the CUNY J-school is very good at the job, grads get good jobs, with less student debt than other journalism schools.”

Newmark launched Craigslist as a for-profit corporation in 1995 (despite the dot-org domain name) and is still (as far as anyone knows) the majority owner of the privately held company, which is worth billions even though its revenue has been sliding steadily since it peaked at more than $1.0 billion in 2018 (the AIM Group will release its 2023 revenue estimate for Craigslist next month).