At NADA Show 2026, Olivia Stapleton of Dealer Teamwork presented Shift Happens: Navigating the Next Generation’s NEW Road to the Dealership, on selling to Generation Z. The central line is a good one, and worth putting in front of any South African dealer principal:
“Gen Z compares you to TikTok, not just other dealers.”
The advice underneath it is sound, practical and mostly free to implement. We are going to get to it. But this deck also carries ten statistics, not one of which has a source printed anywhere on any slide, so we traced each of them before repeating any. That exercise turned out to be the most useful thing in the session, and it is where we are starting.
We checked the numbers. You should not use them.
Six claims, traced back as far as the published record allows. None of them survives in the form the slides present.
“A goldfish has a 9 second attention span. Gen Z has 8.”
The deck opens on this, one slide for the goldfish and one for Gen Z. It is among the best-documented fake statistics in marketing.
The trail runs to a Microsoft Canada report on attention spans from 2015, where the 8 and 9 second figures appear once, on a scene-setting slide, credited to a statistics aggregation website called Statistic Brain. When the BBC World Service programme More or Less investigated in 2017, the authorities Statistic Brain had cited could find no such research, and the site would not produce the underlying study.
The part that should finish the claim off is what Microsoft’s own research actually found. It measured attention as index scores and attention bursts, never in seconds, never involved a goldfish, and reported no generational figure at all. Its foreword opens: think digital is killing attention spans? Think again. Microsoft has since taken the report off its site.
So the deck’s opening claim about the generation it is teaching you to sell to is a number nobody measured, about a fish, contradicted by the report it is usually attributed to.
“85 per cent say hidden costs are deal-breakers, 68 per cent won’t return after being misled”
We cannot find these anywhere. Not in a survey, not in a press release, not in a vendor report. Not even in the sprawling “150+ Gen Z marketing statistics” listicles that exist purely to hoover up every quotable figure in circulation, and which pick up any real vendor survey within months. A number that is absent from all of them while being presented confidently on a conference slide is a number with a provenance problem.
“350 feet of daily scrolling”
This one has a traceable ancestor, and the trail is instructive. In September 2017, Andrew Keller, then global creative director of Facebook’s Creative Shop, told a conference audience that “the average person scrolls through 300 feet, or one Statue of Liberty, of mobile content every day”. No sample, no methodology, no panel, no measurement instrument was ever published. It was an opening line in a pitch for mobile-first ad creative.
Nine years later it has grown by fifty feet and been reassigned to Gen Z specifically. The deck illustrates it with a photograph of the Statue of Liberty, which is the fingerprint of the 2017 original.
“73 per cent will pay more for transparent brands”
This is real, and it is the most instructive failure of the set. It comes from Label Insight’s 2016 Transparency ROI Study, a survey of 2,021 American consumers released in August 2016.
What “transparency” meant in that study was food labelling: ingredient lists, allergen information, nutritional breakdowns and how products were sourced and handled. It is a grocery-aisle finding about packaging. In this deck it is presented, three separate times, as evidence about dealership pricing.
“66 per cent want a personalised experience, 50 per cent would switch brands for it”
The pair appears nowhere as stated. The nearest real parent is Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer, whose 2020 edition found that 66 per cent of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. That is a different question to wanting a personalised experience, the sample blends 12,000 consumers with 3,600 business buyers across 27 countries, and nothing in it is automotive. The same item has read 73 per cent and 65 per cent in other editions of the same report, which is reason enough never to quote a bare 66.
“38 per cent would buy entirely online, 43 per cent still believe dealerships are essential”
Both figures are real and come from a single study: the 2024 Urban Science Dealership Transformation Index, conducted by The Harris Poll, fielded February 2024 among 3,005 American adults and 250 dealers.
The deck labels the 38 per cent as “consumers”. In the source it is Gen Z specifically. That may sound like a quibble, but it inverts the argument: a slide arguing that Gen Z is different is using a Gen Z number relabelled as everyone.
Why this matters for your dealership: none of this makes the session’s advice wrong. It makes the evidence unusable. If you are about to put a number in a board pack, on a slide for your OEM, or in an ad, that number needs a source you have personally seen. Second-hand statistics have a way of becoming your problem at exactly the wrong moment.
The advice, which is better than the evidence
Strip the numbers out and a sensible operating model remains. The session organises it around five shifts.
The experience is the product. The line worth keeping is that for this buyer, the process is the product: if the journey feels broken, the sale never happens. Three qualities are named, and they are the right three: personalised, seamless, and on my terms. Four non-negotiables follow, and none of them requires a budget. Be immediate, in minutes rather than hours. Be transparent about pricing, fees and process. Be personal, because relevance converts. Be everywhere, or be out.
Transparency is not optional. The strongest slide in the deck is a real deal worksheet, which we come back to below.
Consistency across every channel. Buyers do not separate your platforms; they see one brand. Four things have to agree: inventory accuracy, pricing, the experience across platforms, and what your team says. Fragmented experiences produce fractured trust.
The information power shift. The old model was gatekept, fragmented, sales-controlled, dealer-knows-best. The new one is searchable, accessible, personal, experience-oriented. The instruction that follows is the best sentence in the deck: shift from being an information gatekeeper to an information partner.
Loyalty is local. Dealer trust is the new brand equity. Buyers want online control and offline validation, which is a genuinely useful way to describe what most South African buyers actually do: research everything themselves, then come in to check that you are real.
The fee slide, and its South African twin
The best thing in the session is a photograph of an actual American deal worksheet, with the documentation fee highlighted. Converted at roughly sixteen rand to the dollar, it runs like this: a recommended retail price near R614,000, a selling price near R574,000, and then the additions. A documentation fee around R5,800. A dealer preparation fee around R21,000. Something called VIN etching, around R11,300. Temporary registration, around R11,600.
Close to R50,000 of charges arriving after the advertised price, one of which is a security marking most buyers never asked for.
Every South African reader has just recognised this, because we have our own version and ours may be harder to defend. Our equivalent is the on-the-road fee, sometimes split into a delivery fee and a separate admin fee, covering pre-delivery checks, a valet and paperwork. Reporting by TopAuto and East Coast Radio puts these at upwards of R4,000 even on cars under R200,000, and the two together can exceed R10,000.
Set that against what the underlying service actually costs. Registering a vehicle yourself in the Western Cape runs to R282, and licensing one in the 1,001 to 1,250 kilogram band to R462. R744, all in.
There is also a legal dimension the American deck has no reason to raise. As consumer reporting has set out, the National Credit Act permits a limited set of costs to be added to a financed deal: initiation fees, actual delivery, extended warranties, a tank of fuel, and licence and registration. Operating costs beyond that belong inside the purchase price rather than appearing as an unexplained line afterwards. Cash purchases sit differently again. If your finance and insurance desk is adding charges outside that list, the transparency conversation is no longer a marketing one, and it is worth putting in front of whoever handles your compliance rather than your marketing agency.
Why this matters for your dealership: the session’s framing is that every fee tells a story, and that if you explain it they will understand but if you hide it they will walk. That is right, and here it comes with a second reason to get it right.
Two slides worth stealing outright
The ad comparison. Two search ads side by side. The good one names the model and model year, says how many are in stock, gives a monthly figure, a purchase price, the finance rate and the term, and offers three specific links. The bad one says “great deals happening now” and “come in today and drive away in a brand new Ford”, with one generic link. Same money, same platform, entirely different quality of enquiry. Show it to whoever writes your Google ads.
One caution before you copy the good version here: a South African ad quoting a monthly instalment pulls you into National Credit Act disclosure territory, the same trap we flagged in our piece on sales team social media. Specificity is the goal, but the specific numbers need the required wording around them.
The price in three places. The consistency slide is a screenshot of the same offer appearing identically on the website widget, in the ad creative and on the landing page, with the matching figures ringed in green. It is a boring slide and it is the whole of the consistency argument. If your advertised price, your website price and your showroom price disagree, nothing else you do in marketing matters much.
“If this looks familiar, you’ve already lost the deal”
Under that heading sits a screenshot of a form: Unlock our Best Instant Price. Please provide your contact information to instantly reveal this vehicle’s Instant Price. First name, last name, preferred contact method, phone, email.
Every South African dealer website has a version of this, usually reading “contact us for price” or “enquire for best offer”. The session’s position is that it is now a losing pattern, and we agree. A buyer who has to trade their phone number for a number you could simply have published has learned something about you before they have spoken to anyone. Under POPIA you also have to justify collecting that information, and “we wanted a lead” is a weak basis.
The alternative the deck proposes is straightforward: publish the out-the-door price, or in our terms the on-the-road price with the charges itemised, and let the form be for people who want to talk rather than people who want a figure.
What changes when you bring this to South Africa
The online-purchase figures do not transfer. The 38 and 43 per cent are American, from early 2024, and they are about a market with far more mature online car retail. Do not put them in a South African board pack. If you want a local read, look at your own enquiry data and your own conversion path, and at what the local marketplaces publish about their own traffic.
Immediate means WhatsApp here. The session says minutes rather than hours. In South Africa the channel that delivers that is WhatsApp, not email and not a web form, and your response-time promise should be built around it.
Our Gen Z buyer has a different balance sheet. South African youth unemployment and credit affordability rules mean a large share of this cohort is buying used, buying with a co-signatory, or not buying yet. The National Credit Act affordability assessment shapes the deal in a way no American session accounts for. Transparency about what someone can actually finance matters more here than transparency about trim levels.
Offline validation is stronger, not weaker. The online control and offline validation framing fits South Africa well, and the validation step carries more weight because buyers here are more wary of being caught out. Hellopeter, community groups and word of mouth do that job, which makes them worth more attention than a national brand campaign.
Data cost shapes the journey. A buyer on mobile data will not sit through a slow, image-heavy vehicle page to find a price. Page weight is a transparency issue here, not just a performance one.
What to do this month
- Run the five-minute audit the deck proposes, as a buyer rather than as staff: can you find an on-the-road price, is it the same everywhere, is stock accurate in real time, how fast does a quote come back, and are the next steps obvious?
- List every charge you add after the advertised price, and check each one against what the National Credit Act permits. Ask your compliance adviser, not your agency.
- Find every “contact us for price” on your website and either publish the price or justify the form.
- Take one live offer and check it reads identically on the ad, the website and the landing page. Fix whichever one is wrong.
- Time your own enquiry response from a phone you do not own, on a Saturday.
- Delete any Gen Z statistic currently sitting in your marketing deck that you cannot trace to a named study you have read.
The honest summary
This is a vendor session, and the least well-evidenced of the seven we have covered from the show. Ten statistics, not one source printed on any slide. Of the six we tested: one is a documented myth that the cited report actually contradicts, three cannot be traced to any study at all, one is a real 2016 survey about food labelling repurposed as automotive pricing research, and one is real but relabelled in a way that reverses what it measured.
And yet the advice is fine. Publish your prices. Itemise your fees. Make the ad, the website and the showroom agree. Answer quickly. Stop making people fill in a form to see a number. Be an information partner rather than a gatekeeper. None of that needed a statistic to justify it, which rather makes the point.
The closing line is the one we would keep: the future of automotive is not about keeping up with Gen Z, it is about adapting to the consumer we have all become. That is true, and it is free.
If you would like us to run the five-minute audit on your dealership, or to check whether the numbers in your current marketing deck can actually be sourced, get in touch.
This is the seventh piece in our series on NADA and ATD Show 2026, alongside Jumpstarting Your Sales Team’s Social Media, The Age of AI Search, 6 Marketing Mistakes and How AI Solves Them, Disrupt Yourself Before the Market Disrupts You, Leading With Emotional Intelligence in the AI Age and Driving Service Revenue With AI and CDP Advertising.
Source
- Olivia Stapleton, Dealer Teamwork, “Shift Happens: Navigating the Next Generation’s NEW Road to the Dealership”, NADA Show 2026, Las Vegas, 3 to 6 February 2026. Written from the 43-slide deck. The session audio could not be transcribed on our equipment, so this covers what was on screen and not what was said around it.
- No statistic in the deck carries a source on any slide. Traced here: Label Insight, 2016 Transparency ROI Study, 2,021 US consumers, August 2016. Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer, 4th Edition, October 2020. Urban Science Dealership Transformation Index 2024, conducted by The Harris Poll, fielded February 2024, 3,005 US adults and 250 dealers. The “300 feet” scrolling line originates with Andrew Keller of Facebook Creative Shop at Advertising Week New York, September 2017, and carries no published methodology. The attention-span claim traces to Microsoft Canada’s 2015 Attention Spans report, which credits it to the aggregator Statistic Brain; the BBC World Service programme More or Less found in March 2017 that the cited authorities had no such research and the site would not produce it.
- South African fee context from TopAuto, East Coast Radio and Hippo. Dollar figures converted at 16.19 to the rand, the rate on 13 August 2026, and rounded. Nothing here is legal or compliance advice: check your own fee schedule with a qualified adviser.
- The South African localisation, the POPIA and National Credit Act commentary and the statistical tracing are ours, not the presenter’s.