VinRev Journal covers automotive marketing for the people doing the work. Dealer marketing managers. General managers who own the ad budget. Agency teams running dealer accounts. If your job involves getting a vehicle in front of a buyer, this is written for you.

Why this exists

Most automotive marketing coverage falls into one of two buckets. Trade press reports what happened at the manufacturer level, which matters if you run a dealer group and not much if you run a marketing calendar. Vendor blogs explain why you should buy the vendor’s product. Useful sometimes. Rarely honest about what doesn’t work.

There’s a gap in between. Nobody was writing about the actual daily problems: why your VDPs don’t convert in March, what happens to your traffic when Google ships a core update, whether an AI assistant will cite your dealership or the vendor who sold you the website. That gap is what VinRev is for.

The publication launched in March 2026. It’s young, and we’d rather say so than pretend otherwise.

What we cover

Four beats, and we stay in our lane:

• Automotive marketing. Search, content, paid, and the measurement that tells you whether any of it worked.
• Dealer culture. How stores actually operate, who makes decisions, and why good marketing dies in the handoff between departments.
• Industry news. What changed, and specifically what a dealer marketer should do about it Monday morning.
• Used vehicle marketing. Acquisition, merchandising, and the seasonal swings that move used inventory.

Women in Automotive Marketing

Our recurring interview series profiles women running marketing at dealerships and dealer groups. Blue Sitten at Yoder Family of Companies. Lexy Tabbert on building rural SEO that works. Jordan Malone-Forst at Jay Malone Motors. Sarah Pesek on building a marketing function from the inside out.

These aren’t award-show profiles. They’re working interviews about what these marketers tried, what it cost, and what they’d do differently. It’s the reporting we’re proudest of and the reason a lot of readers found us in the first place.

Who writes it

Branden Bodendorfer founded VinRev Journal in 2026 and edits it. He works in automotive marketing in central Wisconsin, focused on search, content strategy, and how dealership content shows up in AI-driven search results. He writes most of what appears here.

Lexy Tabbert and Ryan Green contribute.

That’s the whole masthead. Three people. We mention it because a small publication that tells you it’s small is easier to trust than one that doesn’t.

How we work

A few commitments worth stating plainly.

We write from experience, not from summaries. If an article describes a tactic, somebody ran it. If it includes a number, that number came from a real account or a named source.

We take positions. Most articles end with a section that says what we actually think. You’re free to disagree, and some of you will.

We correct things. If we get something wrong, tell us and we’ll fix it and say what changed. Corrections go at the bottom of the article, dated.

We disclose. This site runs advertising and uses analytics. Both are described in our privacy policy. If an article covers a company Branden has a working relationship with, that relationship gets stated in the article.

Get in touch

Story tips, corrections, interview suggestions, or a disagreement worth publishing: support@brandenbodendorfer.com. More ways to reach us on the contact page.