In this episode of “Tales From the Beat” host and TTAC Creator Ed Garsten speaks with Hooniverse podcast host and former journalist and PR pro Dan Roth. With that multi-platform profile, Roth fits the “Tales From the Beat” profile perfectly, working on both sides of the news and PR scrimmage line.
Ed and Dan have a spirited conversation about how Dan has applied his experiences to different spaces, the culture shock of going from a newsroom to corporate PR, the viability of auto shows as a PR tool, messaging EVs and more.
TTAC Creator Ed Garsten hosts ” Tales from the Beat,” a podcast about the automotive and media worlds. A veteran reporter and public relations operative, Garsten worked for CNN, The Associated Press, The Detroit News, Chrysler’s PR department and Franco Public Relations. He is currently a senior contributor for Forbes.
The TTAC Creators Series tells stories and amplifies creators from all corners of the car world, including culture, dealerships, collections, modified builds and more.
Full Transcript
03/19/2025
Tales From the Beat Episode 108-Dan Roth
00:00:00 Speaker 2
Hi everyone, I’m Ed Garsten and welcome to episode 108 of Tales from the Beat, where we look at news and PR from both sides of the scrimmage line. And I am pleased to welcome Dan Roth, who has a long career playing on both sides of the line, tackling, intercepting, scoring. Jeez, Dan, I think I just incurred a 20 -yard penalty. Yeah, penalty. Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, like abuse of a metaphor. Sorry. I’m glad you didn’t get up and leave and go, I’m not gonna talk to this guy. No, it’s okay. But welcome. Welcome to the podcast. Really pleased to finally get a chance. I think this is the first time we’ve actually had a chance to speak. I think so. Yeah, so thank you for having me. It’s been, we spoke once in the past when I was with Autoblog years ago, I interviewed Ralph Shield, and I think you set that up, which was a very cool interview. Many lifetimes ago. Many, many lifetimes ago. Okay. All right. Well, good. So it’s a second time we’re talking, but why don’t you start with, I know
00:01:06 Speaker 2
that you’re starting a new gig. You can only talk so much about it. You host a podcast, but you’ve been internal. But give folks just a little, a little background of what you’ve done over the years. Sure. So going way back, I actually went to film school and from there I wound up in broadcast production, did a lot of audio mixes on a lot of very obnoxious television commercials. And that was parallel with my start as an automotive journalist. And then from there, I continued in advertising until an opportunity showed up at Ford and I used my automotive journalism contacts that I had spent about 10 years with Autoblog at that point, maybe more. I started as a producer for their podcast and a writer and just worked into car reviews and general news and learned the beat that way. and came at it as an enthusiast. I had always wanted to write for Car and Driver. When I was a kid, I wrote to Bill Jeans, who was the editor -in -chief, like, how do I do this? And he sent back a very informative
00:02:20 Speaker 2
note with lots of advice that I sort of followed. And then the role at Ford was internal communications, and that surprisingly brought together all of the disciplines. So being a very hands -on broadcast producer, so I would write, edit, shoot. I was creative director at an ad agency just before that. So how to get messages to stick and how to get people to do things. Well, that’s very important for internal communications, whether you want them to share the new images of the car you’re launching and be brand advocates as employees, or whether you want to let everybody know that today is the taco truck. All of that comes together and the advertising side of it helped me understand how to message effectively, how to measure it, and then how to make decisions off of those metrics.
00:03:20 Speaker 2
So, I’ve followed a similar path. You’re going from journalism to corporate over at the many versions of Chrysler. I think I was with three different versions of Chrysler and then I retired from Chrysler and now I’m doing whatever I feel like doing, but I once joked, they had a press event with Mary Barra, GM, and you’re supposed to say, you know, your name and your affiliation, and I just told them, well, hi, Mary, I’m Ed Garstin, and I’m here with who’s ever paying me today. And she actually laughed, and that’s good. PR guys should laugh, you know, he’s a reporter. But I was just curious from your standpoint, because I have some definite opinions about it. What was it like for you then going from journalism into the corporate world and what were some of the adjustments you had to make? So the main thing that I found, it was expected but a little bit shocking at how deep it was. Journalists, auto journalists who haven’t spent any time at an automaker really don’t have any idea how the
00:04:26 Speaker 2
businesses run. There’s there’s a lot of loose talk about, well, they could just do this, or they could just do that, or why didn’t they think of X, Y, or Z? I guarantee you they did, and there’s a reason why they didn’t do it that way. You may agree with it or not agree with it, but they’re very thorough, the big automakers. They’re very thorough. They look at a lot of different sides of every issue. They have great people working for them. The other thing that I found was they have a ton of bureaucracy. There’s especially in, as you, as you climb the ladder in auto, the egos get large, the, they, because they’re successful people and so they trust themselves, which is, is great, but it can also be difficult for that to, to make things effective. You know, you’ve got this person who trusts themself above everybody else, but they really need to trust their teams. And as a good leader, you put a good team in place and you push decisions down as much as you can. And sometimes that happens,
00:05:37 Speaker 2
sometimes it doesn’t. They’re just, they’re sprawling organizations. And it was a lot to learn. And it was fascinating, endlessly fascinating. Oh yeah. I mean, I always tell people, as alternatingly fascinating as you say, but horrifying too, because I’d see stuff And I’ve told the story many times, but I just wanted to ask a guy a question yeah, and I walked over to his desk and He he turned around and looked shocked and then I go back I asked him my question He answers it and I go back to my desk and about a half an hour later. My boss comes over to me and says You went over to his desk this guy’s desk. I said Yeah, because I have legs And you know, I could walk She said, no, you didn’t send him a meeting invite, a calendar invite for a meeting. I said, well, I didn’t want a meeting. I just had a question. She goes, well, around here, it’s a meeting. You know, as a reporter, you know how it is. You just get, you do what you need to do to get what you need. Yeah, well, and reporters, and
00:06:45 Speaker 2
when you’re in the media that way, and being in advertising, we use curse words as commas. So it was like very much a real, you know, atmosphere of chaos, but in a good way. And you’re doers, you’re always doers. So a reporter, part of your nature is, I don’t care about your title, I don’t care how high you are in the company, I’m going to ask you a question, we’re going to work together as colleagues and equals. And, you know, when you’re automaker comms, either internal or external, you have a common goal. So you shouldn’t be fighting each other. The bureaucracy and the sort of, well, this is the way we do things can be a lot to learn and navigating that, making the connections. That was, that’s the untold kind of challenge. Yeah, and the other thing I noticed, and I don’t know if you did too, but how little, so many of them really understand understand how news decisions are made by the media. Yes. And that they have no idea what the process is. I was just wondering, what did you find
00:07:57 Speaker 2
on that note? Very similar. I caught myself saying, you know, a few times, like nobody cares about this as much as you care about it. And trying to explain even, you understand your audience as a journalist, you know, that that’s how you nurture and grow your audience and you effectively communicate. So we know what the people will respond to. We know what their comments are, because usually the subjects have come up before. And a lot of times, it’s more of a top -down effort. Well, this is important to us. Tell them why it’s important. And, okay, we need to back you up now and say, so what? To you, executive person, why should they care about this? Because most of the time, you know, they’re looking for the things that are important to them and here are the things that are important to them. Relate the two and it’s magic. Yeah, I think the most, I don’t know if I got a horrifying question, but naive or a stupid question was somehow during the Cerberus days at Chrysler, now I was started
00:09:10 Speaker 2
out as a contractor, but was taken on role and they created a department for me, this digital communications department. This is back in 2006, so social media and stuff was still pretty new. But anyway, somehow I got sucked into a meeting with the upper managers and the CEO, and he didn’t like the press at all. And he asked, do you think I should do news conferences? And nobody would would answer and then he’ll talk to me like, oh, you’re a reporter. And so I said to him, yeah, of course you should do them. And he goes, why? All I ever do is ask hard questions. I said, well, if you say something, it’s going to be high up in the story and you’ll make your point. If you put out a statement or, you know, a canned quote in the press release, then, you know, maybe it will, well, maybe it won’t make the story and it doesn’t have the impact that you wish. And he goes, hmm, that’s great information. I’m still not gonna do them. And he never did. That strategy though, that’s so important to understand
00:10:16 Speaker 2
how the press works and how to package your stories. If you’ve got something that the press is going to care about, that you know is kind of the zeitgeist, you still have to make the reporter’s job easier. That’s your way, if you’re pitching out to really be effective. Give them all the materials they need. Make it easy to find. Make your people easy to talk to. And some companies are good at this. Some are not so good, but you have to be willing to take those hard questions. It’s that show of humility. And you get out there and you take them in and it’s okay as a leader. They don’t ever like to not have answers, but it’s okay to be there and say, I don’t know that. We will definitely get back to you, and then you follow up. Or to kind of, you know, say, I can’t talk about it, you know. But it’s good because that press is almost the megaphone of what is happening on the street, so you need to hear from them. Absolutely. And it was always the, I don’t know if you encountered this as well,
00:11:27 Speaker 2
Dan, but But the difference between management treating the PR people as sort of order takers, counselors. And I’m just wondering, what did you find the case most of the time? There’s, yes, there’s a strong desire to get your thing out there. And so the PR people are the ones who take that message to the world. but you can’t, you know, for example, you can’t make something go viral. It either will or it won’t. The best you can do is the, I guess, it’s shoe leather kind of pitch work, right? You’re, you have your contacts, you as a PR person, you reach out to your contacts and you say, here’s what I’d like you to talk about. You know, you’re matching the story to the reporter and you’re trying to bring them in. You’re a consultant, you know, you’re the conduit. um it that puts you in in that difficult spot you know sometimes you have to fine tune it to to make it sing to really be an attractive pitch because you know publications they’re not your your you know pr department either so it’s
00:12:38 Speaker 2
got to be an attractive story for that yeah it’s you know it’s amazing um i do some pr consulting and do media training and one of the things that we try to impress upon people when we’re doing the training is, and that I didn’t realize people didn’t understand it until I got out in the field, is that people in corporate settings don’t seem to understand the difference between a news story, a press release, and an ad. Yeah. Yeah, you know, and I’ve had people say, oh, I read the ad you wrote about such and such a company. And I said, God forbid that should be the case. First of all, I don’t write ads. The second of all, if I did, I wasn’t really paid very well for it. So, you know, the people who write ads get paid pretty good money, but they just don’t understand the difference between it. And actually had years ago, I was covering GM for Detroit News. I wrote something about Saturn and the PR person for the, I’d done an interview with a woman who was the head of Saturn. And the next day,
00:13:48 Speaker 2
her PR person said, she really liked your story, except for the objectivity of it. Well, that’s great. That’s if you’re going to get any kind of feedback, that’s the kind to get. You know, what I think would be really helpful for the people who get into those automaker PR roles is to have spent time working in the press. And some Some have, but some have gotten there, you know, other ways. They came in to PR from product comms, which they’re not the same, you know, automaker product comms. It’s kind of upside down. You have all the goodies, the press is going to be very friendly to you. They’re going to come to you. That’s not how it works in the real world. you have to earn your audience. And so you have to package it in a way that makes it attractive and smart. And so your job, I think, is to think of, well, how do I give this outlet that I really want the coverage from? If you wanted coverage from Wired, what’s an exclusive you can give to Wired? How do you think that way? It’s something
00:15:00 Speaker 2
different because what we always saw when I was with Autoblog was everybody from our competitors got invited to the same press trips. Everybody’s stories had pictures that looked the same. And it was the same narrative because it was the narrative that you all got while you ate the sandwich from the automaker. And it’s valuable to do those first drives and things, but getting exclusives is just, it’s much better overall. And so being able to give them is a smart move. You know, I have to tell you, Dan, that when I was hired at Chrysler First to run their very first blog, the head of PR Jason Vines wanted to have a blog to talk back to reporters and say if he didn’t like the stories or if he wanted to plant stories. But I learned so much actually from reading Autoblog about how social media worked and how online media works, so I owe really a debt to Autoblog and some of the other blogs and websites that were out there just to learn how to operate in that media because it was really so different
00:16:12 Speaker 2
from writing for, I mean, I was a television reporter most of my life, but then I went to print when CNN had that awesome, I told you, with AOL and told a thousand of us to get lost and close the bureau here in Detroit, which was unfortunate. But anyway, but I just wanted to mention that, how much I appreciated that and spoke to, I forget who exactly was the editor of Autoblog way back then, 2005. John Nash. Yeah, yeah. And I talked to them and they taught me so much and appreciated that because I mean, I was a rude, like, you know, what do I do? You know, we were all making it up as we went along, though. We were just, we were learning. We weren’t all traditional journalists. So, it’s good it brought us that different perspective. But we didn’t know how it worked. No, I mean, you know, it’s funny when I would go to, I remember going to a product team meeting and we’d started doing audio podcasts way back then even. And I said, I don’t know, this audio podcast we did on such and such a
00:17:23 Speaker 2
car got so many hits. And the head of product communication who is a skeptic in ACES looks at me and goes, what does that mean? I think you’re covering something up. I said, I don’t know what the hell it means. I mean, it’s that that many people that hadn’t heard your message before heard it. So it’s incremental at best, but what that means as far as how many cars you’re gonna sell, I don’t have it. Yeah, like you said, Dan, we’re just learning. These are new tools. Yeah. So, but I mean, it was a great journey anyway. It was fun to learn all that stuff. And now you see how well it works. I mean, you can’t live without it. Yeah, yeah, and it’s a whole new world. AOL kind of bit us with the corporatization too. When I came on to Autoblog, they had just gotten bought by AOL and they were a good steward for a while, but it became more of a profit center. So it evolved from what it had been to kind of what it is now. Now they’re owned by the, I think the Arena Group. So it’s the same company
00:18:29 Speaker 2
that sort of vacuumed out Sports Illustrated. and that’s a little bit unfortunate, but there are some bright spots. Everybody shifts. They kind of move to the next outlet. There’s a lot of people on YouTube now. Podcasting is sort of always steady in the background. There’s new outlets. So it’s actually a very small industry. Everybody knows everybody else. Oh, sure. Oh, sure. I mean, and all you have is your reputation because I know when I got laid off at CNN and I didn’t really know what to do. You have your reputation and people were very, very kind and gave me opportunities based on my past work or in spite of it.
00:19:16 Speaker 2
That’s how it goes. So, all right. On this note, we just finished a week or so ago this auto show here in Detroit, and we’ve been talking a lot about sort of the tactic of it. It’s not the big show. It’s not an international show anymore. It was an auto show. There’s cars and some old -line journalists, you know, hanging around. I’m not even going to cover it anymore. There’s no real news, and there’s no of those big shows anymore. and so I’m just curious, Dan, you know, what do you think about this whole evolution away from revealing the vehicles and getting your messages out, putting executives out at an auto show as far as a communications tool for automakers and suppliers? I don’t think they’re dead. I think they’re different. You know, it’s really hard for me to rack my brain and think of something that measures up to that time Bob Lutz drove through the window at Cobo. Yeah. And that’s, if you’re going to be splashy, that’s the scale of it. I also, I think when they launched the Ram
00:20:35 Speaker 2
brand, they had the cattle drive. Oh, yeah. That can become like a snowball where you’re just topping each other or trying to top each other. That may not go where you need it to go. just sucks up money to make a spectacle. But it’s always smart to put your executives out there, especially if it’s a two -way street. Have a long Q &A. Plan for a long Q &A and make sure that they are well prepared. That’s going to get you the coverage because the reporter will ask a question and they’ll get an answer and they’re going to report on it instead of, yeah, the guy stood up for 10 minutes, red teleprompter, and then they rolled the car out and shot off some pyro. You do want to see the cars. I always wanted to see the cars up close. It’s really hard at an auto show to get a ton of time with the vehicle. So to do anything beyond a surface level impression of seeing this new thing in the metal up close, that’s important to a degree, but you have no actual impressions of comfort or driving or UI or
00:21:44 Speaker 2
all those things that matter to consumers that are going to drive the coverage of your vehicle. How is it to live with? How is it to use? So the auto show is a tool for, it’s a fishing lark. You get your reporters there and you give them access to those people to answer the questions and to see some of the product. But the real benefit to auto shows is if you want to sell cars, people come to auto shows. So it’s less the press days and more making sure you’re there in some way for the people who want to come and see your cars. So I think it’s returning to its roots. Yeah. I think it’s a good thing. Well, I started covering the Detroit show and I moved up here. I think the first show I covered was in 1990 and the shows weren’t they were sort of becoming big and then they they sure they escalated with the jeep going through the glass and I worked at Chrysler when they did this thing called Slava’s Snow Show and it was this clown troupe from New York. It was a fabulous show to introduce this
00:22:57 Speaker 2
vehicle but I challenge you to tell me and God people loved the show. I’m going to challenge you to tell me what vehicle they launched with it. Literally no one remembered what vehicle it was. Were you there? I don’t know if you were there back then. I don’t think I was there. It should have been around 2006, 2000. Yeah, about 2006, 2007. Yeah, I don’t remember that one. Yeah. Well, it was this fabulous show and it got all, And all the TV spots, they would feature it because it was, but no one remembers the car. And we spent, I don’t know, a million, whatever it was to put on this show and no one remembers it. And I’ll tell you what it was. It was this forgettable vehicle that was a Chrysler version of a Dodge Durango called the Chrysler Aspen. Oh, I remember the Aspen, yeah. Yeah, it had a life about as long as a flea. Um, it was a hybrid though. You had a hybrid Well the aspen That has been back then It was really just sort of a top hat, uh back then and yeah, yeah, it lasted about one
00:24:09 Speaker 2
cycle and then was quickly you know removed but um But now I mean they think it’s more effective now the way automaker’s doing it now. Uh, revealing vehicles, you know through unilateral sort of webcasts, social media, stuff like that, and not being, you know, having to fight for attention at a show. Yeah, and that was always something I, you know, kind of was watching. And I think I’ve given that advice a lot of times over the last few years is you have your own event. It puts you in more control of the situation. People get better, you know, better materials out of it because you’re not taking a picture of your car with the reflection of your competitor’s logo in the glass and stuff, you know, like the auto show, it’s for the local dealers, it’s for the local customers, and you as an automaker support that. And that’s, it’s almost like a, it’s a sales tool versus a media coverage tool. Yeah, sure. So, one other type of messaging I’m really curious about, and I’ve been talking to a people
00:25:18 Speaker 2
about this, because it’s something that sort of is intriguing to me, is about the way you think the EV message has been conveyed to the public and how it may be affecting the rate of adoption of EVs, which it’s increasing for sure, but still not at the rate that certainly the automakers had hoped it would be. So, I mean, do you think that EVs have been introduced, were introduced to the public and they’re still being promoted to the public in a way that gives them confidence to make this change or is there still some sort of flaw in the strategy? I think they’re getting better. EVs, they’re popular with customers when they have a chance to try them out. So that’s often your best strategies, like put butts in seats, go do a regional events, try it out. Everybody is worried about range anxiety and the automakers haven’t been real confident in messaging about that. They’ve, you know, Alex Roy, I don’t know if you know Alex, but he was, I think he’s with a company now or he did a post about
00:26:36 Speaker 2
narrative command. So the idea of you control the message and that’s how you succeed. And unfortunately, the doom about, well, you can’t take this on a road trip, is still the prevailing message about EVs. Look, I don’t drive 400 miles every single day with my gas cars. I do 25, maybe. So that’s, I think, a message that could be more aggressively put out there is, Yes, range is an issue to a degree, but overall, we’ve got it down. Some of the things have been bungled with the cars versus the infrastructure. That’s unfortunate. That’s money and build out. I don’t know how you get around that other than what they’ve done, which is buying into Tesla’s charging network.
00:27:35 Speaker 2
But they seem less than confident about, we built this product almost not because it’s great and because it’s fuel agnostic. We don’t talk about that. We talk about only the climate side of it. But the other side of it is it doesn’t care what generates those sine waves that make the charger work. So you could charge it with a generator. You could charge it with a coal -fired power plant, you could charge it with a trash incinerator, you can charge it with solar panels, wind power. It doesn’t care. As long as the electricity is doing that, you’re filling the batteries. And so that’s actually an advantage versus a gas car. It only takes one type of fuel. Yeah, yeah. I think that, and that’s part of it, is that people are only given sort of, to me anyway, a narrow sort of corridor of information. And if they knew, I’d never actually heard anybody say that before, just what you said. And that’s a great message. That’s a great way to put it, but you don’t see any more. And I think people do
00:28:49 Speaker 2
fear, people don’t like to change their lifestyle. They like the whole concept of going to the gas station, pumping five minutes, run in, get a coffee and a candy bar and run out, maybe a hot dog. And they don’t like to change. I mean, I was watching these guys the other day, there’s a recharging station, EV go station near my bank. And it’s always filled. And, you know, it’s cold this time of year. And I’m seeing these poor guys just sort of standing around impatiently going in their car, out of their car, waiting for the thing to charge up and thinking, oh, these poor guys, they probably hate this, having to wait around and waste this time. But I mean, that’s what it takes. It takes longer to fill up, and then they should have had a home charger. Maybe they don’t have one or access. Well, yeah. I think also there’s a real trend to everybody’s chasing Tesla and the idea of an EV as only this high -tech screen -filled thing. I think that only goes so far. It’s definitely a premium product.
00:30:00 Speaker 2
And so when you think about the charging experience, well, that could be your idea of a third place if you had thought about it smartly and partnered, but not everybody has time or money to go get lunch while car charges. So there’s, it’s, it’s going to take time before the charging improves and before everybody can can buy it. But the automakers almost like my take on it is that they’re generally not as competent as they need to be. They have good products. Yeah. And they’ll only get better. Sure. They just seem afraid of their shadow. They seem afraid of the criticism. and it’s not just with EVs. I think the prevailing mood I found was there’s a bit of fear versus confidence. Yeah, I think so. And the sad part is, if you’ve driven an electric car, they’re really wonderful to drive. They’re great. Yeah. And people just need to sample them. And I I think they just, you know, maybe dealers need to have loan or the automakers need to set up more public activations and let people just try
00:31:08 Speaker 2
them out and sort of become converts by experiencing them. Yeah, and it’s not even necessarily any more expensive. You’re just taking your marketing dollars. Broadcast has really shrunk. You know, everybody’s stratified on different apps. And so the money you would have spent in the past Yeah on broadcast advertising some of that off to experiential get go where the people are sure Well, we only got a couple of minutes left. So before it has been a really great conversation and just wanting You do you also host a podcast, right? I do I had started back up the universe podcast over with those those folks a bunch of journalism veterans uh scrappy little site and we did a little bit different take on the shows. They have a little five -minute uh intro story that’s a little bit highly produced a little bit more highly produced and then we we have a chat. Awesome, awesome. We’ll uh we’ll catch that and it’s on all the usual platforms we can access? Yes uh it’s uh you can find it on Spotify even
00:32:16 Speaker 2
YouTube it’s it’s around. All right so everyone uh give Hooniverse podcast a listen. Dan Roth thank you so much for great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. And thank you all for listening to this episode of Tales from the Beat. I’m Ed Garstin and I’ll be back soon with more tales. Thanks a lot. Take care.
