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