Strong Incentives Help Vault Hyundai and Kia To Top ASI Ranks

Nashville, TN — Dataium, the largest aggregator of online automotive shopper behavior, today released its monthly ASI report. The ASI (Automotive Shopper Intensity) index, a leading predictive indicator of automotive retail sales, demonstrated close to a 20% uptick in ASI numbers that began the second week in June, and was reflected in June's sales numbers. Corporate leasing continued to be a large part of the retail SAAR number, and has aided new vehicle sales in sustaining a 10% increase over 2011 levels. Building on the strong demand in June, July is looking to be a solid month for auto manufacturers; as incentives, up nearly 10% from last year, provide a strong boost to the summer buying season.

July could be the start of a turnaround for luxury makes, with BMW and Lexus ranking first and second in ASI for all makes. Inventory searches and leads for BMW grew 14% and 9% respectively from May, while leads on Lexus dealer websites grew almost 60%.

This month, Toyota Camry's winning streak was broken by Korean manufacturers, which surpassed their Japanese competitors to rank highest in ASI for new vehicles. Aided by a combination of compelling marketing campaigns promoting fuel efficiency and strong incentives, Hyundai's Sonata and Elantra leapt to the top two spots. Joining Hyundai was fellow Korean car maker Kia, which had two in its lineup, the Sorento and Optima rank third and fifth respectively.

Eric Brown, Dataium CEO stated "We are seeing erratic movement in the ASI from month to month, which is compounded by a lengthening of the buying cycle." He added, "These behavioral swings seem to indicate the consumer is struggling with making large purchase decisions amidst economic, political and employment uncertainty."

Through proprietary data collection and analytics, Dataium aggregates and measures billions of auto shopper behavioral events from a database of nearly 200 million active auto shoppers across a diverse network of thousands of automotive websites. Dataium not only provides data and research on auto shopper/buyer behavior nationally, but by specific makes, models, vehicle segments, and markets. The national report is available for download at www.dataium.com/library. Dataium reports and dashboards are available on a subscription basis or may be customized to access real-time updates to measure in-market lead behavior, sales forecasting, advertising effectiveness, digital marketing performance, and website design proficiency.

To request complete access to Dataium's ASI predictive modeling tool on future consumer demand by make, model, trim level, segment, region, and market, contact Dataium at www.dataium.com/contact, or call 877-896-DATA (3282).

About Dataium, LLC
Dataium is the largest aggregator of Internet automotive shopping activity. With its Cloud Intelligence® platform, the company collects, analyzes, and indexes billions of online automotive shopping events from nearly 30 million active auto shoppers monthly. The company supports cutting-edge data collection and reporting technology; VisiCogn® Collection Utility, VisiCogn® Knowledge Center, and is also known for its ASI™ index. For more information, visit www.dataium.com, email: info@dataium.com, or call 877-896-DATA (3282).

07/23/12