Leveraging Technology for Localized Advertising with Faruk Heplevent

Faruk Heplevent is the CEO of The Scope, which he founded in 2007. The Scope uses cutting edge Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) technology to create images for vehicle launches and advertisements. Faruk is a creative force in the automotive marketing industry, and has a strong background in photography.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• How Faruk got into CGI after losing his job to CGI.
• The turn of automotive photography and branding with the adoption of CGI.
• The high stress of launching a new car to the market.
• There’s no one-size-fits all when it comes to automotive advertising.

In this episode…

It’s no small feat to get a new car model to market – and it comes with a budget to match. 

By their very nature, cars are the perfect candidate for smart advertising technology. Their size and weight make them difficult to transport which makes technology the perfect partner in bringing those models to the public. 

If the technology exists to create advertising with local or tangible context  – think mountains for Colorado dealerships, desert for Nevada – without the time and resources it takes to transport a car across the country, or even the world, why not use it? Skimming some time and money off of the go-to-market budget could make a world of a difference – in budget and in impact. 

In this episode of InsideAuto, Faruk Heplevent, CEO at The Scope, chats with Ilana Shabtay about how CGI revolutionized the automotive photography and advertising industry, how CGI, AI, and other technologies can make it harder for creatives to enter the market, and how these technologies do in fact make for more localized marketing. 

Resources Mentioned: 

• Ilana Shabtay on LinkedIn 
• Fullpath 
• Faruk Heplevent on LinkedIn
• The Scope

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Fullpath.

Fullpath is the automotive industry’s leading customer data and experience platform (CDXP).

Fullpath enables dealers to turn their first-party data into lifelong customers by unifying siloed data sources and leveraging that data to create exceptional, hyper-personalized customer experiences.

To learn more, visit www.fullpath.com

Episode Transcript:

Ilana Shabtay (00:18)

Ilana Shabtay here, host of InsideAuto podcast, where we interview top dealers, GMs, marketers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders in and out of the automotive industry. And before we introduce today’s guest, this episode is sponsored by Fullpath.com. Fullpath is the automotive industry’s leading customer data and experience platform. Fullpath enables dealers to turn their first party data into lifelong customers by unifying silo data sources and leveraging that data to create exceptional hyper-personalized

customer experiences. To learn more, visit Fullpath.com. Today’s guest is Faruk Heplevent It’s nice to have you on the show.

Faruk (00:58)

Thank you for having me, Ilana.

Ilana Shabtay (01:00)

Did I say, did I pronounce your last name correctly?

Faruk (01:02)

Yes, perfect. Absolutely perfect.

Ilana Shabtay (01:03)

Awesome. Okay. Well, I’m so happy to have you here Faruk. And for those who aren’t familiar, Faruk is the creative force in the automotive marketing industry and now founder and CEO of the company, of company, The Scope. He founded The Scope in 2007, has a large background in photography. So we’ll talk about that. The Scope is a company that uses cutting edge CGI technology to create images for vehicle launches and advertisements. So we’ll talk about that a lot today.

He works with all the big brands, all the markets, really excited. He can speak about this better than me. So Faruk, again, thank you for joining us. So before we get into what The Scope actually does and what are some of the challenges that you’re solving in automotive for our dealers and for manufacturers, let’s talk a little bit about how you made the transition, or it’s not even a transition because you were sort of always in the realm of photography, right? But how did you get into automotive?

Faruk (01:41)

Thank you for having me.

Yeah.

Well, essentially, when I started my career as an assistant, you know, I started with with local photographers in Hamburg, and you know, fairly quickly started working for gentlemen that was in car photography, which was quite different back in the back in the 90s. It was a very complex, complicated technical endeavor. I think what is probably hard to imagine for many people these days is that there was no Photoshop in the 90s.

Did not exist. So you would have to get everything in camera and imagine, you know, you need to get the right light, the car position, the car in location, expose the film correctly, get a process. It was difficult to do. It was expensive to produce those things. At the same time there was much less photography or advertising assets produced those days.

Ilana Shabtay (02:35)

Mm -hmm.

Faruk (02:59)

and also was shot on film. Film was expensive so it was a difficult market to get into, difficult market to start. You would have to work as an assistant for a very long time, build a portfolio which was incredibly expensive, like fifty sixty seventy thousand to put together a portfolio before you could even go out and ask for jobs essentially but the development in technology also photography

Ilana Shabtay (03:00)

Mm -hmm.

Faruk (03:28)

You know, helped  me to get into that market. I was lucky enough that, you know, with the dot com.

bubble, let’s say new stuff was cool. So also that, you know, reflected in the car photography market, and they’re like, let’s try a new young guys. So you know, and I was working together with a partner, which was very unusual at that time, also having a photography team and not just one person. So we had, you know, kind of a fresh approach to it and got lucky before, you know, new was not so cool anymore. And we already had established, you know, some some footholds.

Ilana Shabtay (03:45)

Mm -hmm.

Right.

Faruk (04:06)

and we’re working for German car brands, you know, Audi, Volkswagen, BMW. So I did that for quite a while. And when the family started growing, my wife said, well, you know, I didn’t really want want to marry a sailor because in a car photographer’s life is you follow the sun, great lifestyle without the family.

So, you know, the usual suspects are you go to Cape Town over winter, you go to southern Spain during the European summer, you go out to the American West to shoot, because you have the infrastructure there, you have weather stability, you have production resources. And during that time, CGI was starting to show up in the automotive world, they, you know, the automotive market.

Ilana Shabtay (04:40)

Yep.

Faruk (04:56)

took on CGI very early computer generated imagery because they were creating the cars and computer to begin with and you know building cars for launches and transporting them, flying them across the world was a very you know very very expensive thing to do so they would hand built the cars that were photographed or filmed which you know could cost like one one and a half million per car because they were hand built and actually they wouldn’t drive, you need to

Ilana Shabtay (04:58)

I’m sorry.

Faruk (05:25)

push them around and you know, fake it kind of. So that’s why the car manufacturers jumped onto the CGI technology very early because you know, they would save money, they would save resources, save time. And there’s also this thing that when you launch a car, there is a certain amount of secrecy to it. It’s not because the competition is going to steal your design, they want to control the marketing message. You don’t want the first picture of of that car to be

Ilana Shabtay (05:34)

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Faruk (05:56)

you know, essentially, a car paparazzi shot and there are car paparazzi. I mean, they’re basically just hunting, you know, prototypes. So, you know, to protect their marketing impact,  they would send security people on on set. I mean, they were like, really trained and they were like three security people, they could protect humans, but they were protecting a car from being photographed was crazy.

Ilana Shabtay (06:07)

Right.

Wow.

And that’s just like an added expense to this whole process. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah.

Faruk (06:24)

It’s an added expenses and added complexity, it limits your choice. You know, you cannot shoot in the city, it’s just not possible. And with the, you know, let’s say in the 90s, it was still kind of controllable. But but you know, digital photography popping up cell phones popping up, you know, so the danger of being photographed just kept rising. So and when? Yeah, sure. no.

Ilana Shabtay (06:41)

Right.

So if you don’t mind me if you don’t mind my ignorance here, but when did CGI? When when was that really introduced into automotive was that when you came in already they were using CGI technology

Faruk (06:59)

No, it was, you know, the CGI technology towards marketing, marketing facing, I would say it started 2005, 2006. And, you know,

Ilana Shabtay (07:07)

Okay, okay.

Faruk (07:09)

also trigger for me to look deeper into that market was, you know, I lost a job to CGI. So, you know, there was a CGI studio, the client said, Well, now this needs to be CGI. And the studio said, they don’t have experience with CGI. So we’re going to use somebody else. And I said, that’s not that’s not a good thing. Let me look into this. Right. And

Ilana Shabtay (07:16)

Mmm, interesting.

It’s really interesting.

Yeah, I think that’s actually a really important message also for today in general, like as generative AI is coming out and it’s potentially gonna replace people’s positions, how do you figure out how to learn it and leverage it and have the human element to make it much better? So I mean, that’s so relevant to so much that we talk about.

Faruk (07:38)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it’s exactly it’s an interesting  comparison because in essentially my career, so we went from film photography to digital photography. So that changed a lot of things.

Ilana Shabtay (07:56)

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Faruk (07:57)

didn’t really break everything like AI does these days, but it, you know, democratized access to photography. So you didn’t need 70,000 to put together a portfolio. If you were smart, you could do it like with eight, 10. So it made it possible for other creatives to enter the market, which I actually like a lot because you know, it was not

Ilana Shabtay (08:01)

Right.

Faruk (08:19)

tech block anymore, capital blocks. If you were creative, you were good, you had a good a chance. At the same time, the amount of pictures that are necessary these days just exploded. I need to look it up properly. But I think it was like in 2000. I think Kodak that was the year that Kodak processed most film ever, ever, ever, right. And then from then on it declined because digital photography picked up.

Ilana Shabtay (08:21)

Right, right.

Right.

Faruk (08:46)

But if I’m not mistaken, the amount of film they process, how many million it was, it’s like something that gets uploaded to the internet now every two minutes or every minute. The amount of imagery just exploded. But imagine, it’s like, you know, there was no Instagram, there was no YouTube, there was no, you know, it’s like, you didn’t need so much content. You couldn’t publish so much content. So

Ilana Shabtay (08:55)

Wow.

Wow.

That’s insane to think about. Yeah. Wow.

Right.

Great.

No. You couldn’t share so much constant instantly, right? Like think about Google Photos or my shared Apple albums. Wow. Incredible. Yeah. Yeah.

Faruk (09:15)

No.

I was very cumbersome. I mean, it’s like back then it didn’t feel like that to us. You know, it was like the one hour photo was like the high speed. Yeah, yeah.

Ilana Shabtay (09:26)

Right.

I remember that too. I would take my photos and I would go, I actually loved the wait though. There’s something really precious about not getting something instantly and going and waiting for your photos to be developed. There’s something nostalgic about that for me.

Faruk (09:42)

That’s true.

there’s an there’s not something nostalgic, there’s a nice surprise to it. But imagine doing that on a professional level was seven people are standing behind you breathing down your neck and telling you, did you get a shot? Do we have to shot? It’s a very expensive day. Did you get the shot? Yeah. So

Ilana Shabtay (09:49)

Yeah.

Exactly. of course. Yeah. Not productive or efficient at all, but very nostalgic. So…

Faruk (10:12)

So this is essentially where I come from. So but in the end, what I think also what because it touched on AI. My experience and my belief is it is ultimately it is you know, the experience of a human being that makes creative decisions. Yes, you can prompt stuff but also

Ilana Shabtay (10:12)

So, okay, so yeah, okay.

Mm -hmm.

Faruk (10:38)

very clear learning for me is like my head of studios, a much more creative guy than I am. But when he prompts, it just looks better than when I prompt. And yes, I could go and copy, you know, but you know, I get the same thing. So it is, it still has a lot to do with, you know, how deep you involve yourself with the technology, how, you know, how much time you spend with it.

You get quick wins. Absolutely. Right. It’s like, you know, one hour photo, or you have it on the phone and just send it to your friend, right? Yes. And in many, many cases, that’s, that’s good. And it’s sufficient, solves a lot of problems. It’s all good, right? It’s an AI as we see it, and we’ll keep doing that. We’ll eat the market from below, like I use, you know, it’s like,

Ilana Shabtay (11:09)

Yeah, of course.

Faruk (11:27)

instead of going buying stock from Adobe or Google, you know, you prompt it, use it for whatever you use it for. And I think it’s cool, you know, if you can, if people that are not trained as designers can have a very nice thank you card, birthday card, invitation, you know, the million things people do with it or small business owner can generate a very decently designed piece of marketing content that

Ilana Shabtay (11:47)

Course.

Faruk (11:56)

helps her and him to make the sale, get the clients. Awesome, right? I think that’s great.

Ilana Shabtay (12:00)

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So now for, let’s talk specifically about what you’re doing for car dealers right now with the CGI technology. And is it the same across all markets? If you want to touch on that a bit as well.

Faruk (12:08)

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, so it’s, you know, it’s like, what I know what we do is, you know, goes to car dealers eventually, but I don’t, at this point, I don’t have a direct connection to car dealers. So what we do is we work for OEMs or their, you know, agency of record. And especially, you know, what the launch situation that we’re specialized in, it’s a very high level, high stress situation. So essentially, normal.

Ilana Shabtay (12:25)

Right. Okay.

Faruk (12:44)

marketing productions, you have the agency, you know, you have normal timings, everything goes as planned, more or less, that’s fine. In a large situation, what you have is involvement of all top level players, right? CMO is on board, CEO is on board, the head of the agency is on board, the head of design is on board, because these people, these teams have been working on that vehicle for

three and a half years at least. And very, you know, and there’s usually a lot of money riding on it. And it’s a very important event. It’s the first portrait of the car towards the market. So that’s why it becomes such a high level decision making situation.

Ilana Shabtay (13:31)

Yeah.

Faruk (13:33)

And what we develop, we developed a process to deal with that because when you imagine any CEO, right, it’s a CEO, CMO, you know, they don’t have much time. And let’s say you show them a photograph of a car. And if you say, well, this is the shot, but you have to imagine we’re going to add trees, we’re going to change the light a bit in the color. They won’t even read that message. Right. And even if they read it, they’re like, yeah, okay, but

Ilana Shabtay (14:00)

Right.

But show it to me as is, yeah. Like, exactly.

Faruk (14:03)

You want me to don’t tell me show me that is the exact sentence that one CMO working on the very one of the very first launch projects is like we’re like, you know, doing the normal things and here’s a mood board, we do this and he’s like, what are you doing? Don’t tell me show me and I’m like, okay, this is this is the message, right? This is and it was so we need to be re-engineered our production process to be able to do that.

Ilana Shabtay (14:23)

Yeah.

That’s incredible.

Faruk (14:33)

To be able to do that, we realize, well, we need to build fully 3D environments, which is getting easier now, but still quite a complex process. So this is essentially our secret sauce that we have locations,

so that we have locations where we can just open, put the car in and start creating images. Instead of saying, you need this and then you start compiling it and building it. And that’s the only way to survive a large situation for photo and film.

Ilana Shabtay (14:51)

cool.

That’s really cool. That’s really cool. Yeah.

Yeah. And that’s the same across markets, meaning obviously there are nuances, but you feel like you’re serving the same purpose across different markets. Yeah.

Faruk (15:17)

When you look at the launch situation, it is, it’s also kind of a comforting thought. It’s everybody is the same globally. Now, yeah, I’ll imagine it’s gonna be fine. I have time. Let’s talk about this for three hours.

Ilana Shabtay (15:25)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was going to say, I don’t think any CEO is going to be like, show me a mood board and just tell me what you’re going to do. Right. Understandable. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And what are your predictions if you have any specific to photography and imagery when it comes to automotive or beyond that in the next 12 months? What do you see? What do you think we’ll see in the automotive industry?

Faruk (15:52)

Well, we see  Well, photography and film. So we see obviously, we, you know, we follow the developments in AI. And we’ve been using AI under the hood. So we’re using it to create things that we need for a location. So we, you know, we’ve been and it

Ilana Shabtay (15:52)

or as it pertains to photography.

Faruk (16:15)

you know, actually, it was called machine learning, well, we started using it AI, which essentially is the same thing. So there is I mean, the technology can do great stuff, except for the GPT and midjourney these things are more, you know, public facing, but industrially, let’s say it has great powers. But we see trends where big agency holdings and

Ilana Shabtay (16:19)

Yeah

Faruk (16:44)

agencies are rolling out their own AIs to create layouts to to, you know, get closer to something they want produced. I don’t think it’s going to, you know, because I don’t think it’s going to substitute what we do. It’s, it might substitute certain things, and especially

Ilana Shabtay (17:10)

Right?

Faruk (17:14)

you know, with the dealerships. And I know in America, the dealerships run a lot of, you know, campaigns themselves. So they create a lot of things themselves. And we heard, you know, we know there is the wish and the need for more localization for the for the

Ilana Shabtay (17:24)

Right, right.

Faruk (17:34)

dealerships because obviously they’re like, well, yeah, it’s California, but I’m in Florida. It’s like, you know, guys on in Minnesota doesn’t look like that here. Right. So they got and shoot.

Ilana Shabtay (17:43)

Right, right, totally. I mean, we hear that too, even at Fullpath right? Like images that we have embedded in our advertising, et cetera. If it’s a Minnesota dealer and it looks like the South Beach, we’re going to have a problem. Yeah.

Faruk (17:50)

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. So the localization, I think, AI, you know, I would I would encourage dealerships to talk to their local advertising agencies and try to leverage that. I don’t think, you know, what I have seen so far, obviously, you’re not getting product correct cars out of AI yet, it’s getting better, but it’s not, you know, it’s not product correct. But if anybody out there is interested in has some

Ilana Shabtay (18:10)

Yep.

Faruk (18:27)

you know, tech savvy people on board. I would totally suggest to look at a thing that is called ComfyUI . The market is so young that the names are

created by nerds. So that’s why I don’t know why it’s called ComfyUI . Okay. For them, it makes total sense. But it’s like a ComfyUI is like whatever. So but essentially, ComfyUI is a very interesting thing. It’s very techie. So you need a, you know, somebody who is comfortable with technology. But essentially, what you can do is like a user interface where you can, you know,

Ilana Shabtay (19:05)

Well that’s, that’s where the UI comes from. For those who are from… Yeah. It’s just awesome UI. Yeah. It’s very subjective. Yeah.

Faruk (19:08)

Exactly. So it’s like, and the comfy is comfy. But when you look at it, you’re like, this doesn’t look comfy. It looks comfy for you know, tech tech person. Yeah. So it’s like these things and nodes connect them and it looks like a drawing board. But what you can do if you find somebody that can can use it, it’s so you can, you know, get ready made models. And then

Ilana Shabtay (19:13)

Hahaha

Hehehehe

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Faruk (19:37)

connect them so you have a more controlled image generation tool. And you can drive that with CG. This is what we’re doing. So essentially, we’re saying this is my car angle. This is the car we rent the masks out and then use ComfyUI to create variations of the background. So we have a faster layout process instead of doing it in Photoshop. And you can prompt it and say, I want this shot out with snow, I want rain, I want backlight, you know, so you can you can design with it.

Ilana Shabtay (19:43)

That’s cool.

That’s cool.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Faruk (20:07)

and have something that gets us to don’t tell me show me. Right. And don’t tell me show me that we can then execute in high res for a launch situation. But I can imagine that, you know, if you if you find someone who can do that, that you, you know, take a take a shot of the car and on the parking lot, and then create a background that goes with it and it comes in so you will have a very personalized, very quick

Ilana Shabtay (20:11)

Right. That’s cool.

Right.

Faruk (20:36)

local ad campaign.

Ilana Shabtay (20:39)

Yeah, I mean, I would assume, so what you’re basically saying is more AI adoption in this area in the next 12 months for sure, but also human perfected, right? So like make sure that there’s a human perfecting that process, looking at it, applying it, changing it, maintaining it. So we’ll see, you know, in the next 12 months how this develops.

Faruk (20:47)

yeah.

Yeah, you know, creating the base asset, let’s say, no matter how if it’s a launch or something that the dealer is creating for themselves. I think that is very important, because then I’m very sure there’s a million tools out there, AI tools where you can say, okay, just crop that into different formats, give me a film to do all these things to multiply the asset. But I think it’s worth spending time and effort on the base asset, make that strong. And it doesn’t mean it has to be

Ilana Shabtay (21:07)

Mm -hmm.

Yep.

Yeah.

Faruk (21:29)

you know, Guggenheim kind of quality. It’s if it’s you know, if it’s a cowboy riding on an alligator that rocks somebody’s boat, you can get that, you know. So that is, you know, creatively, I think that is exciting can also have very crazy ideas, very, you know, flashy things. And test it out, right? I mean, that’s the advantage of the internet, you tend to know when nobody clicks it, just drop it.

Ilana Shabtay (21:38)

Yeah, incredible.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s cool. I mean also when you have AI to help you, you can test more things at scale because you just can produce so much more. Like, I mean just think about the Kodak example we were talking about. Like there’s just so much more execution at scale. Well Faruk, thank you so much for joining InsideAuto Podcast today. For those of you joining, if you like this episode, please tune in InsideAutoPodcast.com. You can find us on all of your favorite streaming channels on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, you name it. Again, Faruk, thank you so much.

Faruk (22:04)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Thank you, Ilana