You know what’s kind of fun? Being angry. Indignantly angry. Righteous anger, vented with gusto and vigor, and more than a little sprayed saliva. It’s cathartic! It feels good to vent! And oh boy, do I get to vent on the podcast this week, as I rage fecklessly against the miserable practice of pumping ads into your car’s center stack screen, an atrocity most recently committed by BMW as they shoved a Spider-Man movie trailer into BMW owner’s faces.
I’m cross about this sort of thing, so very very cross. Your car is your own little island of solitude in a chaotic world, a cocoon of comfort, and the last thing you need is to have yet more advertising blasted at you.
You’re paying for your car! A hell of a lot of paying, especially in the case of BMW! It’s such a kick in the nuggets to be paying for a premium land-motorcraft, and then it starts to try to sell you some crap – that’s the sort of thing that you get when you, say, sign up for the lowest-tier streaming service subscription or something, not
I’ve gone over this before in some detail, I realize, but I haven’t done it verbally, so you can hear the tired resignation in my voice, at least not yet. But that’s where our podcast, Carbage Time, which you can listen to right here, comes in:
Listening is great, sure, but what if you want to listen and see, see the veins bulging in my forehead, the way my eyes unfocus when I’m ranting, and the subtle look of dismay on Matt’s face as the realization that his professional fate is tied to me slowly dawns on him? What then?
Well, in that case, you can watch our podcast here!
In the podcast, I mentioned a hideous, dystopian idea I had about 20 years ago, and how painfully plausible it feels today. It was an idea for how one could make free hearing aids, as long as the person who uses them agrees to hear three minutes of ads blasted into their ears at twice normal volume every hour.
It was a nightmarish concept. This was before every tiny device had an internet connection, so I had thought the ads could be stored in flash memory in a unit with the battery, getting replaced every month, and new ads would be on the battery/ad pack.
A modern version would just have a cell connection to stream the ads. Either way is horrible, and, really, not so different from having ads played on your car’s dash. Except at least in the case of the hypothetical hearing aid, you’re still getting something (hearing) for free. In your car? You’re still making payments and you’re getting served ads. You get nothing.
If BMW is going to send ads to your dashboard, you should have to pay less for your car. Period. Our attention isn’t free, and they know that, because that’s what they’re selling: our attention. But that’s not what’s happening, and I’m sick of it.
I go over all this in the podcast. Give it a listen! Maybe you’ll find it a bit cathartic as well? Yell along with me! To listen to more podcast episodes, you can go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or you can use the RSS feed and point your favorite podcast player at it.
All of my cars are a bit on the older side. I might be able to afford something newer, but I’m a cheap bastard so I am allergic to buying anything new or nice.
Having said that, I feel like I’m going to end up being one of those people who says stupid stuff like “I’m just going to keep my old cars forever” knowing that as soon as a $3000 repair bill shows up, so does forever. I don’t want to have to keep my cars forever, but I really do not want all of the nonsense that’s getting shoved into cars in the past five years.
I don’t want subscriptions, I don’t want apps, I don’t want survellience, I don’t want advertising. I just want to drive my car and enjoy it. I work in technology and I love tinkering with it as a hobby. As a result, I’ve come to appreciate things where I can decide what I want with the limits only being how hard I’m willing to dig in. HomeAssistant is a wonderful example of this sort of thing. While I don’t envision that there will be an open source car anytime soon, I am distraught by the notion that it will be beyond closed source, it will be locked down and paywalled for every little thing.
I currently have a 19 volvo with a stupid message that says “service volvo on-call”. A backup battery for the system telemetry (hate it) has a 7 year timer that is meant to have you replace the battery. It doesn’t matter if the battery is dead or good, the message appears. There is NOTHING I can to to reset or remove the error. I must take it to the dealer and pay them about $250. To close an error message.
I’m sure my experience is not unique and will only get worse unless there is something that stops this crap. You can’t expect people to stop buying cars, we gotta get to work and stuff. If all the manufacturers do it, your choice matters for nothing. I’m not sure how the hell this stops, I’m so tired of having to rely on useless lawmakers for everything since all they seem to do is enrich themselves on the public dollar.
Lawsuits? Somehow make it cost more money for the manufacturers to do this than it’s worth? I don’t know.
For the price of a new BMW I can have my old truck retrofitted to the nines with a Dakota Digital dash, disc brakes, brand new interior, three point belts, 15/10 rust repair, a clearcoat, AND I can buy a Corolla on top.
WTF, BMW
I can’t imagine people getting past the giant price tag and hideous overall design to even have to worry about in-dash ads.
I promise I won’t buy a new BMW and it is to support Torch, not because I don’t actually want a new BMW.
You can now go to college and get a degree in influencing, so I suppose influencer is now a real job. I hate this reality.
They probably drive BMWs.
That’s covered in Influencer 101.
They call themselves content creator… I got invited by a close friend to some sort of private event for a new music band, when we got there, she had to provide her instagram page name, thats how they book their spot. For myself, I had to pay lol anyway they made her seat in front row because that was for content creator people and what they should record, post online, etc.. all these instructions. Me? Sitting at the bar drinking haha
I thought we had a device on the dash that regularly delivered ads, locally sourced, for free, directly and wirelessly to your car, and people just accepted it. Or tuned into NPR. Because, y’know…it’s a radio.
Even Bluetooth streaming has ads now. Do we really need distracting video ads now, from the manufacturers?
…glad I can’t afford a BMW.
The streaming ads are OK for now because I can skip through them. The terrible part about them is maybe 1 in 100 in tailored to me. They are either other podcasts I have no interest in listening or location specific business ads except somehow they think I’m in a different city in a different state that happens to share the same name as the city I work in. So I get ads for businesses that are 4 hours I’m driving away from, and thus very unlikely to patronize. Lastly, some are the most pointless public service ads, the most recent they are attempting is about how I need to ask everyone I visit if they have an unsecured firearm at home.
The problem with localized internet service ads is that, like search engines, they seem to use whatever major service hub the ISP is using, especially mobile internet. My internet at home is provided by a company 15 minutes to the north, but they feed into a hub in Chicago. Guess where a lot of my searches for “X nearby” send me?
I mainly listen to NPR shows and podcasts on their app when commuting, so the closest thing to an ad I get is some company underwriting.
Honestly, you know what really stands out to me? That it’s a Spider-Man ad.
This isn’t random. This was a very calculated decision by both an ad platform, and by the company seeking ads, that they were thinking, “Yes, you know who REALLY wants Spider-Man? Drivers of modern BMWs.”
What does that say about people who drive modern BMWs that they’re a specifically targeted for Spider-Man ads? Anyone in advertising, please chime in!
Isn’t the BMW model showing the ads in the movie? I thought that was the connection
Superhero movies are kinda in a tough spot – they’re both incredibly popular and incredibly hard to advertise in, since they don’t really take place in our world but look like it.
So you end up getting these tortured product placements that seem at best cringey and nonsensical, and usually do little to move sales. Like, I’m sure almost nobody actually bought Acura crossovers b/c a fictional government agency has them in their motor pool.
Imagine for a moment The Avengers after credits scene where they are eating Shawarma, but instead of some random place, it is McDonald’s and it’s product placement for McDonald’s new McShawarma.
Seriously, BMW can just F all the way off. The subscription heated seats was infuriating; ads are completely unacceptable.