Danny Watts at Dealers United
VP of Product Development. Then VP of Product & Engineering. Four and a half years building cross-channel advertising products for car dealerships, working directly with the four biggest visual social platforms on earth.
The Setup
Imagine you've spent fifteen years building a brand transformation empire in Sarasota. You're the CEO. You've worked with Monster Jam and the Harlem Globetrotters and Disney on Ice. You co-founded an AWS cloud company. You co-founded a dining app. You could keep doing what you're doing forever and nobody would question it.
Instead, you take a VP of Product role at a retail automotive technology company.
That's the move Danny Watts made in February 2019. And it wasn't a retreat. It was a calculated bet that the best way to level up his empire was to spend a few years building products at scale — in an industry where the data problems are massive, the platform partnerships are complex, and the customers (car dealerships) need technology more than they realize.
For four and a half years, Danny built the products that turned Dealers United into a cross-channel advertising powerhouse. He worked directly with Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest. He shipped solutions that let car dealerships run coordinated campaigns across every visual social platform their customers use. And then he went back to ATLARGE as CEO — with a product leadership skillset that most agency founders will never have.
The Dealers United Timeline
Feb 2019
Joins Dealers United as VP of Product Development
Danny steps away from the ATLARGE CEO chair and takes a VP role at a retail automotive technology company. Most people would see this as a step down. Danny saw it as a masterclass waiting to happen — a chance to build products at scale in an industry ripe for transformation.
2019 - 2020
Building the Product Foundation
Inherits the product organization and begins reshaping it. Defines product strategy, builds engineering processes, and starts conversations with the social media platforms that will define the company’s future. The automotive advertising industry is fragmented and analog. Danny starts making it digital and data-driven.
2020 - 2021
Meta & Snapchat Partnerships
Establishes direct working relationships with Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and Snapchat. Builds cross-channel advertising solutions that let car dealerships run coordinated campaigns across platforms. The kind of partnerships where you’re in the room with platform engineers solving problems that don’t have documentation yet.
2021 - 2022
TikTok & Pinterest Expansion
Expands the platform partnership portfolio to include TikTok and Pinterest. Now Dealers United’s products span the four biggest visual social platforms on earth. Cross-channel data solutions that let dealerships target, retarget, and measure across every platform their customers use.
2022 - 2023
VP of Product & Engineering
Promoted to VP of Product & Engineering, now owning both the product vision and the engineering execution. The full stack of product leadership — strategy, design, development, platform partnerships, and data architecture. Four and a half years of building products that reimagined how an entire industry advertises.
Oct 2023
Returns to ATLARGE as CEO
Leaves Dealers United and returns to lead the empire he built. But he doesn’t come back the same person. He comes back with four and a half years of big-platform partnerships, product-led growth experience, and the engineering leadership skills that only come from building at scale. The Dealers United chapter didn’t replace the ATLARGE story. It leveled it up.
The Platform Partnerships
Danny didn't just use these platforms. He worked with them — directly, at the engineering and partnership level — to build advertising solutions that didn't exist before.
Meta
Facebook & InstagramThe largest social advertising platform on earth. Danny’s team built integrations that let car dealerships run hyper-targeted campaigns across Facebook and Instagram with inventory-aware creative and automated bidding. When your product talks directly to Meta’s ad APIs, you’re playing in the big leagues.
Snapchat
Snap AdsReaching younger car buyers where they actually spend time. Danny’s team built Snapchat ad solutions for an industry that had barely discovered Instagram. Cross-channel attribution that proved Snap ads actually moved metal off lots.
TikTok
TikTok for BusinessThe fastest-growing platform and the hardest to crack for automotive. Danny’s team built TikTok advertising products before most dealerships even had a TikTok account. First-mover advantage in a channel that would become essential for reaching Gen Z buyers.
The platform where people go to dream about their next purchase. Danny’s team built Pinterest ad solutions that caught car shoppers in the inspiration phase — before they ever walked onto a lot. Cross-channel retargeting that followed a pin board dreamer all the way to a dealership visit.
The Product Challenge
Here's the thing about automotive advertising: it's one of the most fragmented, analog, and relationship-driven industries in the world. Car dealerships have been doing business the same way for decades — newspaper ads, radio spots, TV commercials, and the occasional Google Ads campaign.
Now imagine walking into that world and saying: “What if your inventory automatically generated creative assets that ran across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest simultaneously, with cross-channel attribution that tells you which platform actually drove the person to your lot?”
That's the problem Danny's team solved. They built products that turned vehicle inventory data into platform-specific ad creative, automated the bidding and targeting across channels, and provided the attribution layer that dealerships needed to understand where their money was actually working.
It's the kind of product work that requires you to understand the advertising APIs of four different social platforms, the business model of car dealerships, the psychology of car buyers at different stages of the funnel, and the engineering required to stitch it all together in real time. Danny did that for four and a half years.
What He Took Back to ATLARGE
When Danny returned to ATLARGE as CEO in late 2023, he didn't come back as the same person who left. He came back with four and a half years of product-led growth experience. He came back understanding how the biggest social platforms in the world build partnerships. He came back knowing how to scale engineering teams, ship products on cadence, and measure outcomes with cross-channel data.
That's the real story of the Dealers United chapter. It wasn't a detour from the ATLARGE empire. It was the training arc. Danny went into automotive ad tech as a branding CEO. He came out as a branding CEO who also understands product development, platform engineering, and data architecture at the scale of Meta and TikTok.
Most agency founders never get that experience. Most agency founders never put themselves in a position where they could. Danny did. And ATLARGE is better for it.
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