You know what would be terrible? Terrible in a sort of dystopian, capitalism-run-amok sort of way? Imagine buying a brand-new, fancy, premium-grade car. From an automaker with a respected name. Like, say, BMW. This is a machine with some status! Let’s say it costs, oh, $61,500, and you’re paying, what, about $1300 a month? Something like that.
Anyway, let’s say you’ve done that, you have your fancy new car you’re dropping over a grand a month on, and then you get in the car one morning, you start it up, and you’re greeted with an ad – a commercial, with visuals and sound – right there on the big screen in the center of your dash.
That would be terrible, right? I mean, hell, even on our little website here, if you just pay a tiny fraction of that car payment a month, we get rid of the ads – so the idea of a carmaker blasting commercials into your car, the car you’re paying for, that sounds miserable. And yet, somehow, it’s true. We’ve seen carmakers like Stellantis do it, and now it appears that BMW is in on this soul-crushing, avaricious bullshit as well. Look at this:
Got this commercial in my car today as part of the Spider-Man – Brand New Day campaign
by
u/Milanista58 in
BMW
What, you are likely inquiring unto the heavens, the fuck is this? And that’s a fantastic question. What’s going on here? Is that actually a full-motion-and-sound advertisement for a Spider-Man movie playing on the center stack screen of that new BMW? Why? How?
Reading the comments, it seems that the ad appears when the car is started, with an option to play it or not being displayed on the screen. I suppose that’s better than it autoplaying, but just barely. It’s still the car taking your time and attention and control of your car’s display to ask if you want to see a damn ad.
I reached out to BMW to get more information about this and to confirm it was actually real, and here is what I was told:
“The in-vehicle animation is part of a broader brand partnership with the film. A few of our vehicles – including the BMW iX3 – were in the film, and a special edition iX3 was featured on the red carpet during last night’s premiere in Los Angeles.”
There was also a link to a BMW press release about this ad campaign, and here is how this in-car ad is described in that release:
Exclusive Spider-Man™ animation available in many BMW vehicles.
To celebrate the partnership with Spider-Man™: Brand New Day, BMW has a special surprise for its drivers. The Spider-Man™ Animation will be available (in participating markets) to all customers with suitably equipped vehicles from 27 July to 10 August. Starting the car brings up a special banner in the Control Display. Clicking on it then activates the Spider-Man™ animation, comprising a full-screen festive animation in the Control Display with aptly chosen backing music and an accompanying light show courtesy of the ambient lighting system. These festive animations will be available in more than 70 countries worldwide for vehicles equipped with the relevant optional equipment and BMW Operating System 7, 8, 8.5, 9 or BMW Operating System X, as well as a production date after 7/2020.
“Exlusive,” huh? A “special surprise?” So there’s a banner ad that pops up, and then you can choose to play the “festive animation.” Lucky you!
Now, look – fun things are fun. Spider-Man is great! I’ve enjoyed Spider-Man since I was a kid! Hell, I think I was even excited to sit through this drivel just because Spidey was in it:
Man, that was some prime ’70s garbage, but dig that funky soundtrack, right? [Ed Note: Don’t sleep on Japanese Spider-Man. He has a giant robot. – Pete]
Anyway, AMC wasn’t broadcasting the opening for that show into black-and-white CRTs on the dashes of new Pacers over VHF not just because they didn’t have the money or technological know-how to pull that off, but also because nobody fucking wants that.
But now BMW is pumping ads for movies into your car and trying to make it sound like they’re giving you some big treat. I think that’s the part that bothers me the most, the couching of this all like we should be delighted that now there’s another place where we can’t escape the constant onslaught of advertising.
There’s something just so wrong about this all, a company treating the people who have bought their cars as just more marks, more targets to be advertised to, more chances to wring money out of those people unfortunate enough to choose to pay that company for their vehicle.
When you buy a car from BMW, do you actually own that car? I own a house, and I make payments to a mortgage company every month, and I’m pretty sure it would be illegal for that mortgage company to put a fucking Spider-Man billboard in my yard, facing my front windows. Is what BMW is doing any different?
Why is the ownership experience of a BMW the same as taking the cheapest tier of a streaming service, where you have to watch ads? If BMW wants to pump ads into cars, they should cut the price of their cars to compensate for the owner’s time! That’s not free, and I know they know that, because the value of that attention is what they’re charging Marvel for to run these stupid ads.
If you want to watch the trailer for the new Spider-Man movie, I think there’s a metric heptillion places to make that happen. No one needs to have this shoved at them in their cars.
I hate this so much. Maybe beyond rationality. I feel like if I owned a BMW and the car started to show me ads on the dashboard, the temptation to put my hands on the back of that screen and pull forward and down, hard, until I heard that satisfying snap of plastic and watched that screen’s image degrade into a colorful yet meaningless array of vertical lines until going black would be hard to resist.
For the past few years, BMW has behaved in a way that seems to treat their buyers as targets for more revenue over everything else. Remember all their subscription bullshit? People hated that, and worked around it, and eventually BMW had to dial that back, because having a subscription for heated seats makes people want to riot.
And I don’t think this is much better.
We’re being shown ads pretty much everywhere. Online all over the place, at the gas pump, as we drive on roads, when we take public transport, when we shop, when we go for a hike, when we do pretty much anything. A car should be a sanctuary from all this. It’s your car. Your dashboard should show you information about your car, maybe a map, and play the music you want. That’s it. Once ads start showing up there, a sacred covenant between carmaker and owner has been broken.
BMW is breaking this covenant. In response, I would suggest to simply not buy any new BMWs. Get an old Isetta if you want a BMW, but as long as that company sees the interior of their cars as a place to shove ads at a captive audience, fuck ’em.
No one wants this. No one asked for this. Knock it off.
Top graphic images: BMW; Marvel
I would question whether we really own our houses. Try not paying your property taxes for a few years, I would say we rent our houses from the county/city.
“Festive” is not a word I associate with Spiderman.
And who do they think they’re fooling by trying to play this off as a themed animation?? I had an Alpine stereo many years ago that would play cute animations for various holidays (and my birthday); there was no advertising involved, and you had the option to disable it. This crap BMW is pushing is nothing like that.
I spent some time in some new BMWs earlier this year as part of training that included “dynamic” aspects – aka we got to drive cars. There was some sort of virtual assistant that took up a bunch of screen real estate and kept wanting to introduce itself. That alone would have been enough to keep me out of one.
I’m waiting for the day when studio executives figure out that HOA’s have a lot of prescriptive power, and “HOA Capture” becomes a viable marketing tactic, as studios capture HOA leadership who in turn require homes to put up specified ad campaigns under threat of HOA fines.
I hate that you just gave someone an idea.
Its cool, I heard you only have to watch the ad if you want to use a blinker to merge or turn, so it should be no worries.
I’m curious if the notoriously stern German auto authorities actually allow this nonsense in der Fatherland?
Pretty sure BMW hates their customers, or clearly doesn’t think highly of them. That might be true of most OEMs, but BMW is saying the quiet part out loud.
When I read stories like this it confirms to me that 2000-2010 is the sweet spot for cars. Lots of safety features (multiple airbags, ABS/traction control, side impact bars), convenience features (power windows/locks, cruise, heated seats) and a simple swap for a Apple Car play headunit and I’ve got everything I need, and all the crap I don’t.
Also, 20-25 year old cars don’t even look as old as they are. Can’t say that about a ’75 Pinto in 2000…or even a ’85 Camry in 2010.
My parents (both in their late 70’s) are due for another new car, at least in their minds, and I don’t know what to suggest…they’re comfortable with the infotainment in their ’19 Edge and it doesn’t have all this bloatware, but anything new…will just confuse them. Hell, it’d confuse ME.
The sweet spot for cars is always about 15 years ago. It’s been that way for a while – from 2000-2010, people were saying the best cars were mid-90s.
As a nice side effect, that’s also pretty close to maximum depreciation.
I don’t know if people will think that about cars from 2020 – 2025…they’re going to be much worse off with this kind of crap, all the bloatware. And I don’t know if that’s true of cars from the mid ’70’s…emission choked overweight and underpowered versus smaller more fuel efficient FWD cars.
In the late 80s people were complaining about how new cars were full of black box computers and would be unrepairable in the future. Give me a carburetor and a set of points!
Having bought 4 cars during the 70s, I can attest that 1973 and 74 were a very low point, with only slightly less suckage before (the smog stuff was easy to remove / tune around) and after (cats starting to come in for 75 helped a lot, and the new for 73-74 diving board bumpers gradually got integrated). Ten years on, if someone was reminiscing about their 1974 Impala, it would be about what a poorly running, audibly rusting in West Texas, half assedly assembled by angry drunken peasants dungheap it was.
Me and my 2011 335i agree completely with you.
Hyper capitalism is disgraceful
We have a ’21 330e and I haven’t seen any ads. We do get cute animations of under a minute for some holidays, like Halloween, but not advertising anything. They seem to happen randomly just a few times a year as notifications that we can click on when the car is parked. I would not be excited if there was advertising.
I have a 2021 BMW I bought off lease in early 2024. The original buyer ticked every option box. My heated seats just work (no subscription) and I’ve never seen an ad on the 2 big screens. I read these stories and it seems like they must be model specific? I would find either rather annoying so I feel lucky.
If I already bought the fucking car featured in the movie why are you advertising the fact that your car was in the movie?
Oh! I get it now. The new generation at BMW misunderstood “Ultimate Driving Machine” to be “the last car you’ll ever buy” – _that’s_ why they seem so increasingly desperate to convince us all to never, ever purchase a new car ever again!
Ya’know, these jackalopes are actually doing me a favor.
Ya wanna give us nothing but touch screen for turning on the wipers (or whatever) when motoring down the road at speed, OK, I suppose I could figure out the muscle memory needed to do that… I did drive an BMW rental recently to involuntarily figure that out. The suckage was audible.
But ads, and tracking, and costing the effing earth to buy to begin with??? I can put up with a bunch of leaky gaskets for less money and as much or more fun.
In the immortal words of Animaniac Dot Warner:
I LUV you!!!! Buh bye!!!!!
+1 for the Animaniac reference.
Mindy (of Mindy & Buttons) said that.
I think the closest Dot had to a catchphrase was “call me Dotty and ya die”
BMWTF
I’ve got a Tron mode in my Tesla that turns the avatar into a lightcycle, turns the dash led strip red, and plays NIN. I use the mode to show off the car to someone new. Only 10% annoyed by that ad. Car has much bigger annoyances.