ooooIYKYK, ISSUE #0000
My name is George Achorn and my work over the years has made me about as much of an Audi insider as one can be without having worked for the company. I’ve covered the brand for years, operating the world’s largest Audi blog, then publishing the world’s largest Audi brand print magazine while managing the largest Audi owner’s club. From these positions, I have watched Audi ebb and flow, shifting massively these past few years. Today, I’m independent, unencumbered by the need to represent others as the face of a larger organization. It is the beginning of a new chapter for me, and it comes at a pivotal time for both Audi and its community of owners, not to mention the general automotive community.
I’m launching a new platform, for those who want to know more about the brand of the four rings, where it came from and where it’s going. My medium centers around a newsletter, augmented by a blog and with a podcast coming soon. This will be a fresh and interactive way of communicating for a new age, and I invite you to come along.
You can subscribe HERE or read below if you want to know more about me and why I’m doing this.
The Deeper Dive
It’s a chaotic time in the auto industry. As interests shift, there’s a struggle at automotive brands between engineers, marketing personnel and finance managers over just how to define the future of mobility. Outside the walls of factories, media opine and politicians malign. Rules shift quickly, as do market tastes. On top of all that, the focus for pretty much anyone with a message seems to have moved from authentically communicating with real people to targeting algorithms in order to game impressions through virality, only measuring success by viewership size or hit numbers.
In the wake of that, ambiguous social media profiles, video platform content creators and influencers are replacing proven industry experts in that same pursuit of monetizable quantity. All that is before we even consider AI tools that aim for more efficient virality and at a lower cost should we place even less emphasis on doing the driving ourselves.
This same sort of thinking unfortunately drives product decisions, which is how cars like the Audi R8, TT and the A/S/RS 5 Coupé just slipped away. Would anyone care about a clear enthusiast marque like Porsche if all they sold were crossovers, sedans and EVs?
This is the moment in which brands such as Audi find themselves, mulling next steps with an obvious struggle between electromobility and internal combustion futures. For the teams inside those car brands, traditional car enthusiasts get so frustrated that many end up leaving or are shown the door. Dealerships question their future as they watch direct-to-consumer start-up manufacturers, and the car enthusiast community struggles to be heard…. all as the future of the automobile and the community that surrounds it are defined.
Who I Am and Why You Should Care
Like most of us who became enthusiasts, I grew up playing with Hot Wheels, modding my BMX, reading car magazines, drawing cars in the margins of my notebooks, and later hatching out modifications I couldn’t afford for my Volkswagen Scirocco 16V.
During the internet boom of the late ‘90s, I was just out of college and began to see an opportunity on the internet for car enthusiasts. I partnered with friends to form Vortex Media Group. VWvortex.com was launched in 1997, then Swedespeed.com in 2001 and later Fourtitude.com that catered to Audi in 2004. These three grew to become backbones of their respective car communities.
The Vortex & Fourtitude Years
Those were heady times in the industry, marking high growth for the brands we covered and explosive growth for anyone launching an online publication. At Vortex we sought to be a bridge between the brands and the community of enthusiasts around them. Forward thinking staff at those car companies seized the opportunity to expand and grow brand enthusiasm by including new digital media titles like mine at the very highest level of brand immersion. At Audi, this meant being there for momentous launches at International Auto Shows, technical test days around Europe and covering racing around the world including the 24 Hours of Le Mans no less than ten times. This all gave me the opportunity to become familiar with Audi’s most senior executives, German board members, product planners, engineers and even motorsport team members…. even star drivers.
Under these conditions, enthusiasts were heard and didn’t just feel like owners along for the ride. Instead, we experienced being an important part of the machine. Allan McNish and later Audi of America’s President popped into our forums to interact with members, product planners conferred with our staff and our forum members to provide input in decision-making. There was an open line of communication to the delight of everyone and inspiring growth in those who cared so deeply about the brand and its success.
Also, we weren’t the only ones. At Audi, other brand enthusiast outlets including Audiworld, quattroWorld, Audizine and Audi Club North America also took part. We competed with each other, at times fiercely. We became comrades, sharing pizza and beer at French street cafés after Le Mans qualifying, one-upping each other by breaking news of new models, or bringing incredible racecars to shows like Waterfest. All of this was heartfelt and authentic, helping build street-level affinity for the brand by enthusiasts who weren’t about to switch to whatever the latest / greatest car was to be launched. And brands, they weren’t simply chasing profits or internet virality.
Why We Sold
At Vortex Media, we built the community with the help of that very community. Forums were the go-to platform and people lived, laughed, cried, conducted business and even met spouses on there. It was real, and it was authentic. But, by 2016 when a multi-national media company finally offered us the number, the one we’d determined we’d take should it ever come at us, we knew it was time to move on.
We could see the traffic was moving to social media platforms. And why shouldn’t it? Those platforms offered people a chance to interact with the rest of the world directly – friends, family, celebrities and even the brands we covered… or at least their newly hired agency operating official social media accounts. Those platforms weren’t toxic nor overrun with ads yet. They felt as community oriented as our forums or the car clubs that came before them.
At the same time, I could see Audi’s latest public relations strategy was to focus entirely on size of readership. Vortex could have owned Audiworld, quattroWorld, Audizine and Fourtitude combined, and we wouldn’t have qualified for the consideration we’d once had. I remember in a moment of frustration telling a confidant inside Audi that they didn’t know what they had with enthusiast outlets, that several of these publications had already sold, and we were receiving offers regularly. I was disappointed when the answer I received was that maybe we should just take the offer. My partner and I could see the writing on the wall, so we accepted the buyout.
In some ways I felt guilty. Did I sell out the community? We’d built the space, and it was ours to sell. The forums were still there and motoring along just fine, but things changed after we left. The sites were owned by a shareholder-run business, and shareholders have expectations that passionate patron owners do not. In that way, social media platforms are no different, and over time they have all become so overrun with algorithmically delivered sponsored content that I find myself using them less and less.
The Audi Club Years
After we sold, a friend at Audi responsible for managing the relationship with Audi Club North America asked me to use my experience and get involved there. Audi Club had been around for over a decade by the time we’d launched Vortex, two decades before I’d launch Fourtitude and over three decades by the time we’d sold our sites. In that time, they’d not adjusted to the web as readily and had suffered as a result. However, they were a non-profit, so not driven simply to earn and not so easy to sell should a buyer come calling. Effectively, that meant overarching management came from a member elected board. It seemed like a worthy project.
I spent the next eight years there, and they went by surprisingly fast. By 2017, I’d helped the club launch a new website. I next assumed Editor duties for their print publication quattro quarterly, shifting from that publication’s use of outside freelancers or whatever content came in to focus more authentically on the brand by engaging members to take part, modernizing the process and elevating the quality. By 2019 we’d redesigned the book to match the improved content, creating a more premium feel befitting a premium brand. A year later, at the beginning of the pandemic, I’d been asked to take over management of the entire club as Executive Director and lead the organization through a challenging time—a job I accepted. I enjoyed the challenge though eventually realized the job wasn’t for me, stepping back at the end of 2023. I remained on as a contractor, running the magazine and website until the end of 2024 when the club’s new team decided to go a different direction. And while I loved working on that magazine at such a strange time for print publications, I’d already realized it was time for a change and was wondering how to make an exit without leaving the club in the lurch.
Sometimes working for Audi Club had been confining. While there, I found working hand-in-hand with the Audi owner community so very rewarding. The team of incredible people we assembled only made it that much more. Working there though made it apparent to me how the club is sometimes seen either as an asset or as a liability to people working inside the brand. Working as I was, I’d been indelibly tied to the organization and had to operate in the club’s interest or be diplomatic because I was a face of that community to so many inside.
I’m not always the best at wearing the game face this required. During these changes in the industry, at the brand and in the community, I have increasingly believed that candor and authenticity are best, even when not always appreciated. Now, unrestricted, I can do just that.
So, Where Do We Go from Here?
I’m not leaving the Audi community. Like a franchise ballplayer spending a career in the same city, I’m still attached to the Audi brand. I have always admired its ability to dig deep and show fortitude (no “u”) in the face of hardship. Overcoming adversity is one of its many admirable traditions. The brand always seems to persevere, pushing ahead past hardships, mishaps and even mistakes.
I have a few projects I’ve been meaning to pursue. Mainly, I want to do cool things with cool people – write a book, produce podcasts and create platforms with content in other areas where I’m curious (see also tailoreddriver.com) or find creative reuse for aging yet iconic Audi automobiles in my garage and beyond. More directly regarding Audi and the community, I want to use what I’ve learned to inform, entertain, educate, curate and help lead this community of Audi aficionados into the next era in my own independent way.
Having worked in competition with others in that crowded space during those years at Fourtitude, I see a very different enthusiast landscape today. There are virtually no independent players and my years at Audi Club North America have taught me how pivotal that organization is, and how important it is that it survive and thrive for the benefit of not just the owner community, but also the brand that too often takes it for granted. I remain an Audi Club member and will continue as a participant and contributor as time goes on. For me though, I think it’s time to approach the four rings in a different way.
About ooooIYKYK
This is ooooIYKYK – four o’s, the letter and not zeros, made more obvious and rounder through lowercase use. The name is maybe an even more esoteric choice than “Fourtitude” and one that will no doubt give me fits every time I have to spell it out or explain it.
What does it mean? Simple. Four rings. If you know, you know. It’s for insiders, or people who aim to be insiders and understand this brand, its future, its heritage, its community and its draw at a level deeper than a monthly lease payment or doom scroll-interrupting post on your social feed.
Just as I had done with Fourtitude, I didn’t want to flirt with using the Audi name like some of my former competitors did. I’m not associated with the Audi brand, and want to be clear about that. This gives me more independence. Unlike my role at Audi Club, I don’t want to be forced to be diplomatic. That doesn’t mean I intend to take hits, but I do believe calling it as I see it, while the knowledge and experience I have accumulated will allow me to more authentically operate in the space.
At the core of ooooIYKYK is a newsletter. I find that’s the most efficient way to reach those who try to hear through the algorithmically generated din. It’s also a way I can make this an effort more suited to the community. I’ll be using Substack, an increasingly popular tool for independent journalists, to manage the newsletter distribution and subscriptions. Though not a new platform, Substack’s automotive segment isn’t very established and so I’m hoping to help broaden that.
Yes, there will be a subscription fee for some of what I’m creating. Like anything in life, this needs to be sustainable if it is to continue. Starting from new in a mature internet market doesn’t give me the benefit of a deep advertiser base like Vortex, or a paid base of members as Audi Club has. Keeping this going is also on those of you who come to appreciate what I offer via ooooIYKYK, to support it via subscribing, to share it with other Audi enthusiasts and to help it grow. I invite you to take part. Enjoy the content, comment on what we run, give suggestions on how I can improve it and, most helpful to me, please share it with other Audi enthusiasts or employees you think may get something from it.