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
It was always going to be BMW. Something need to happen to them so other automakers know they can’t keep leading in ripping people off and making them miserable. Insolvent and bought by a Chinese company would probably do it.
The Chinese have done cross branding. A little button might pop up on the main page of the infotainment you press it up get an app or a sub screen with various cross branding and maybe “exclusive looks” or whatever they want to call them. TV interfaces do the same. Almost all the different TV os. At the top or side there is often some cross branding or basically an ad. Most have a way to disable it.
If you want to do that maybe if you honor if it’s been disabled. But launching a video and asking to play it when you turn on the car is absolutely insane. The next step for bmw will certainly be auto play. Then they will claim it was an accident when people revolt.
Good lord this is genius, BMW bought out by a Chinese company and then turned into a sheer parody of a car!
Oh, you say it already is a parody?
BMWs already look like Chinese copies of BMWs so this seems like a logical next step.
TVs have always been ad-delivering devices, though, so that’s not unexpected. Cars? Eff that.
You could argue once they put the radio in the car it was ad delivering. Radio stations used to capitalize on it. Live traffic and weather and oh this place has a dinner deal. It just wasn’t the automaker pushing it and didn’t have a visual.
This is why I’m so glad I no longer work at an ad agency. I left in 2023 and even then I remember people talking about all the exciting possibilities of in-car advertising. I put up with a lot there, including marketing a quick lube chain I tell everyone to avoid like the plague. I would have put my foot down with in car ads though, people REALLY don’t want those. Not exactly a great look for your brand either.
Said ad agency is down to ~30 employees last I checked, from 200+ when I started in 2016. It’s a hard time to be an agency.
Ugh, I feel ya, my last job was at a small design and marketing agency which meant as a designer I still got roped into a lot of marketing adjacent work and writing some web copy. And somehow it all too often winds up toeing right up and slightly over the line of what’s honest. So glad I’m not there anymore.
In theory there is some version of legitimately marketing and advertising a company’s products/services and I’m especially sympathetic to small business trying to do it, but it just so easily slides down that greasy slope to ethical gray areas and “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”
When the hell did ads become so aggressively all over the place? It feels like you cant use anything online nowadays without being sold to. Want to watch a 14 minute youtube video about a 1988 Chevy Blazer? Here’s two ads at the start, and two more in the middle, and one more when the video is over. Want to look at an article on a website? Sorry buddy, you have to wait as your phone lags from the 7 different ads tripping over each other to be on top of the pop up pile, plus the one on the bottom and the one in the middle. Want to watch something on the streaming service you pay $12 a month for? Better get ready for the 1:30 minute ad break at the beginning, at least two times in the middle, and end of the episode. It’s never ending, and thanks to the algorithm personalization targeting bullshit, it’s the same ads. Is there any concrete evidence that these types of ads work? I’m sure as hell not any more inclined to buy a good or service because it interrupted me with a smarmy ad.
If I ever get supreme powers, I’m finding everyone responsible for this advertising hell and forcing them to live in a movie theater with nonstop ads in everything they do.
Fingers crossed there’s so much pushback to this that BMW and all other OEMs see how bad of an idea this is
This is a good rant!
I fought youtube ads with different ad blockers, but chrome ended up permanently disabling them (there were work rounds for the previous disabling of the actual effective ad blocker they used to have) and then ditched Chrome for Brave. The search engine is even worse than what google has let itself become in the last ten years, but youtube plays without ads. There’s sometimes a momentary delay where I impatiently hit pause and play again like the door close button in an elevator with an open door when I see some obnoxious drunks or weird creep running to join me, but I don’t think I actually have to do that to get them to play. No special plugins, I believe, the default shields just work (I might have had to check something or other, I can’t remember). I did originally try it with an ad block, but youtube saw through it shortly after. Found out I didn’t need it.
I can barely look at this site on my phone. I don’t know if it’s ad load or what, but it only gives me a few minutes before the page reloads, then every few minutes afterwards until it eventually kicks me off and says there’s some kind of error.
You don’t have to use the Brave search engine. It’s just the default. You can change that to another preset or add your own in the settings.
I know, I use google to search still.
AdBlockers are your friend. I regret I have to write this on a site reliant on (and very reasonable with) ads, but in most cases I feel zero remorse for pushing back on this ad-saturated world that was imposed on us.
Ublock Origin in your browser, SponsorBlock extension for YouTube. NextDNS on your phone (assuming iOS, way more options on Android) to route traffic through ad blocking lists. All of this is free.
Use adguard’s ad blocking DNS servers on your home router. Free, solid uptime, and blocks ads to all the devices on your network.
Soon it’ll be ads for you to bet on SPORTSBALL.
Not just the infotainment display, but then automatically set the speakers to 60% volume and play some ads over the stereo system, about betting on SPORTSBALL.
The app on your phone you use for your “connected car?” Sounds like a great opportunity to let you know about the opportunities to bet on SPORTSBALL.
Then you can also be subscribed to mailing list, that’ll send you a weekly newsletter about how exciting life will be if you bet on some SPORTSBALL.
EVs can be made to make noises to alert pedestrians. Perhaps the noise can be changed to inform those pedestrians that they could bet on SPORTSBALL more.
Can the blower fans of the HVAC system be tuned in a way that they oscillate their speed at a frequency that constantly tells you to bet on SPORTSBALL?
SPORTSBALL.
Don’t forget all the predictive market crap as well. It’s not gambling!, it’s predicting the market!!!
At least if the sale is a success you won’t have to worry about the advertising in your next BMW.
60% volume? Rookie numbers. Start at 80% baseline and increase by 1% for every year over 50 the driver is.
The Piggers are going all the way this year.
Roku wants to clutter my TV’s interface with ads, features I don’t want, and unnecessary distractions I’ll never buy into.
In response, I bought a cheap mini PC on eBay, and I’ll use that as my streaming box. The TV never needs to see the internet again.
I’ll also never buy a modern BMW.
Once Google TV replaced the background wallpaper with ads, I promptly dumped the stock launcher and installed Projectivity.
It still runs all the same apps and stuff, but the menu interface is 100% ad-free and customizable. It actually made my older Chromecast- which was getting quite laggy, run far faster since it’s not loading ads in the background constantly.
I’m not sure about Roku sticks. The amazon Fire sticks could easily be jailbroken to install 3rd party/ad free launchers or a stock Android OS without Amazon’s BS embedded for a while, but their latest generation they’ve taken care to lock them down. Of course this is “for your safety” (not really) but it’s really to try and deter piracy and prevent people from avoiding ads and ACR (auto content recognition, those sticks absolutely phone-home with info about precisely what and when you are watching) by using 3rd party OS/launchers that don’t do this. The hardware they sell at a loss, they count on making that back via all the subscriptions they hope you’ll sign up for, ads you’ll watch, and data they’ll collect.
I believe it’s possible but not really feasible to jailbreak Roku devices. It’s alright, I’ll install Linux on the mini PC and be done with it.
I didn’t know about Projectivy. That is definitely getting downloaded and chipping a few bucks their way.
Yep. It’s on both my ShieldTV in the living room and the little Chromecast dongle on the TV out in the garage. I want to say you can even download it right off the on-device play store, no need even to sideload it.
It pairs excellently with SmartTube (a youtube client, but also with ad blocking and Sponsorblock support).
I got so fed up with the division of content over multiple channels, licensing coming and going, constant updates, a glut of lousy content, the need to re-enter login credentials with seeming increasing frequency using their very slow apps, annoying popups (“are you still watching?” Yeah, I’m doing shit with this in the background and need the noise, play the f’n thing until I say!), and ads on a service you’re paying for that I dropped them and went back to buying DVDs. In the end, I realized that I mostly have it as background and tend to “watch” the same chunk of shows. As a bonus, I have the easy excuse not to try watching the crappy* shows people recommend to me
*Mostly, though once in a while, someone gets me.
Plex forever!
I like jellyfin no underhanded tactics and truly open source.
I bought the lifetime Plex pass year and years ago, so I’ve avoided a lot of their shenanigans lately. I’ll jump ship if I need to though.
I bought one when they were something like $75 I think. I just have a feeling they will put the legacy ones in a lower tier locking things out so jumped ship before it became a big issue.
I’ve got a pitchfork ready in case they do.
What does that buy you? Jellyfin does everything useful for free.
I don’t think I will ever own a vehicle made after say 2018 ish. I am done with all this BS.
Seriously considering finding a cherry W124 and putting money into it as my new daily. I’ll keep my GX for truck stuff, it should last another 20 years.
Hey at least they didn’t sneak a surprise U2 album into the stereo without consent
That also made me super mad, I deleted it immediately. Bono has to pay me to listen to his drivel.
I think what makes this worse is the choice of Spider Man, probably the most over exposed and over monetized intellectual property that has existed in the history of mankind. Don’t forget about the fucking Spider Man movie my car said! As if you couldn’t just walk into a movie theatre any time in the past 25 years to find another fucking Spider Man movie playing.
Disgusting behavior by BMW, but not surprising coming from the company that wants to force driver to subscribe to features in their own cars. The future is dim.
I think it’s official, we can issue BMW a headstone for being an enthusiast brand
Unless you’re particularly enthusiastic about Spider-Man.
I’m enthusiastic about Spider-Man, have owned an E30 and E46 too… BMW is dead to me.
I wish we could, but what viable alternative is there to an M car these days? The competition has disappeared.
Me personally, if I’m ever in the market for four doors again I will be looking at spicy Genesis options.
Just when you think we’ve reached peak enshittification, the Boys of Bavaria ask us to hold their bier….
Did nobody learn the right lesson when Apple put that fucking U2 album on everybody’s phone and expected everybody to love it?
Eventually driving in your car is going to be like the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” where you need to pay to keep the commercials at bay. Mercedes is well ahead of the curve on encompassing your with screens. Maybe this is the cocoon Trump was talking about, a cocoon of screens.
Subscriptions and other cash-grab bullshit like this is a MAJOR factor in my purchasing decisions. Right up there with safety, power, features, etc. 100%, no exaggeration. If the day comes where *all* new cars have this crap, I will exclusively buy old cars. Execs and their interest in ‘shareholder value’ can go straight to hell – I hope every single one of these efforts is a colossal waste of money for the manufacturer.
This is an interesting point…we as enthusiasts all have our limit of how much money we will put into an old car. But if the new ones are eventually unusable in the way you described, it may actually be worth it to buy and older car and put “new car” money into it. You would end up with a pretty sweet, reliable, “non-connected” car if you bought a 20-year-old Accord and put $40k into it to drive forever.
The problem is parts availability. I have an ’05 Legacy GT wagon that I bought last year with high miles but a fresh engine thinking it’s not that old and Subaru touts how many of their old cars are still on the road I can replace most of this with new right?
A lot of its early ’00s soft touch plastics are sorta rough looking but turns out they’re NLA, even some of the suspension bushings aren’t available if you want OE. The clutch pedal squeaks and the brake pedal groans but that pedal assembly isn’t available and no amount of greasing the pivots seems to quiet them down. No way to easily fix the heat seat that went bad bc Subaru doesn’t sell the part anymore and nobody carries it third party that I’ve found.
I guess the point is this sounds good in theory but it’s very selective what you can keep alive. I can still get most any major mechanical part 3rd party if not OE, but even if I said I’m going to keep this cool car forever at some point the interior is going to be so trashed I can’t stand to sit in it and all the old parts Legacies will have the same problems. Maybe I’m being too picky, I’ve owned a few older BMWs and somehow this stuff didn’t bug me as much there…well the worn out seat in my ’83 did and there was no easy way to fix that.
I’m hoping car manufacturers’ love for modern software and mobile devices practices of rapid obsolescence and vigorous abandonment of older tech leads to 5-8-year old cars whose internet connectivity simply doesn’t work anymore and protects the second owner from subscriptions and spying.
We live in hell
Capitalism will prevail!!!
While I share the outrage about ads, the situation is actually much worse than that. In order to put the ad on the car BMW had to perform an over-the-air update. OTA updates have a non-zero chance of being problematic, up to and including bricking the affected device. If a completely unnecessary OTA update bricked my car or negatively affected my ability to drive it I would be pissed off beyond belief.
And now the real reason manufacturers are adding more and mores screens to vehicles has been laid bare.
If the ad came on and I shot six holes in screen, would it be covered under warranty? Asking for a friend.
95% of their drivers won’t care, and many of them will think it’s cool to see a movie clip on their car’s screen…
The Ultimate Monetization Machine.
Since they are selling your telemetrics a lawyer ad will pop up as soon as it detects a crash. “Call 444 44 4444. We’ll get you more!”
Morgen und Morgen.
For the people.
Are you saying boo or boo-urns?
I was saying boo-urns…
BMW really seems to be leading the charge of automotive enshittification these days. While Ford is still indulging their fetish for recalls, GM forgot how to make a pushrod v8, and even Hondas are blowing head gaskets now, BMW is really on the bleeding edge of making cars suck in new and more importantly, monetizable ways. All these other companies are happy with just having customers be unpaid beta-testers and then having to pay for recalls and warranty failures themselves. That worsens the owner experience, no doubt, but ultimately costs the company money, which is NOT going to make the line go up and to the right for eternity.
You know these ads may be “optional” for now, but eventually that “skip ad” or “no thanks” button will be replaced with a “Start Free Trial” button for BMW+ instead if you don’t want to sit through a 30 second ad before your car allows itself to come out of park.
Ugh BMW+ feels all too real
oh, fuck all the way off with this nonsense.