Well folks, it finally happened. The screen in your pickup truck… your last bastion of peace from the chaos of unskippable advertisements… now plays popup ads. Not even subtle ones. We’re talking full-dash, head-unit-commandeering infomercial panels in your RAM 1500, like you’re driving a Times Square billboard on wheels.
When did ads become the one commodity to rule them all. They are used more like a threat rather than information. You have to pay to see them or pay to make them go away. Doesn’t make sense. Have adverts replaced gold as the dollar standard? Weird. I guess they are good for money laundering due to the subjective nature of costs for “production”, “design” and “talent”.
Looked at my car radio the other day to see the name of the song playing. Evidently, it was called " injured, get ‘xxxx’ lawyer."
So now this is an ad? But when Apple does similar it’s just letting you know about services offered. I consider both an ad.
I don’t live in the US but the last time I rented a car there the UI was festooned with functionality for Sirius XM that couldn’t be removed or hidden. Not small icons, but big fucking chunks of the screen. I find this kind of thing intolerable. It’s one thing to plug a service but if people don’t want it, then hide it away and don’t nag them about it ever again.
I’ve driven many makes of vehicles and never seen this. Sure the buttons are there but just like the AM)FM. Or you don’t want them their at all it’s just an audio source and purchase a vehicle without satellite radio they still exist.
I think the issues is that you can’t pick and choose exactly what you want in your new vehicle. You can’t say, get just a simple AM/FM radio and get bluetooth. You buy a package of accessories.
This was a Toyota RAV 4 IIRC and despite the vehicle having no subscription to this thing, it occupied the right hand side of the infotainment system and was prominent in the menus too. I had the car for nearly a month and I played around in the settings but saw no way of getting rid of it.
I think the issues is that you can’t pick and choose exactly what you want in your new vehicle. You can’t say, get just a simple AM/FM radio and get bluetooth. You buy a package of accessories.
So if you want just that simple radio, not only don’t you get the bluetooth, but you have to give up the power seats and windows too. It’s an all or nothing choice.
There was a time you would order your new car with individual accessories and then a couple of months to get it. I’m pulling for Slate to be successful and bring that freedom of choice back.
I think all people that see that ads need to pickup a phone and call them asking stupid questions and waste their time, they clearly ask you to do that.
Time to go get a Kei Truck and put an Android tablet in it.
Kei Kei’s delivery service.
I sometimes feel shortchanged as an American (no healthcare, FUUUUCK), but I only get real mad about it when I think about how we don’t get Hiluxes and Kei trucks.
Order a Slate pickup. Buy what you want and only what you want. And add things later as you want or buy that tablet from amazon and a bluetooth speaker and install it yourself.
This is why the argument that paying for something would prevent ads falls apart. If they can squeeze more money out of people then they will, even if those people are paying $80k+ for the damn thing.
Yes I hate that argument and it’s not true. Cars are collecting tons of data and we pay for them, people “pay” for Windows one way or another and it’s collecting data.
Real question is what cable or fuse can I pull to disable this?
Bitch all you want about RAM drivers, but this is coming to all cars. Start resisting now.
Would be the modem. I already do this because of the tracking.
Capitalism will innovate!
Capitalism:
I’m going to start pointing to this when I explain to people why I want “dumb” machines.
I don’t want AI to “summarize” my google search, I don’t want ads distracting drivers, I don’t want a washing machine that needs updates, I don’t want my TV to look at me, I want a submissive little machine that does task X.
Ngl bro but I’ve found some good uses for AI. My kids school gave me 2 bullshit pdfs with duplicate information for their school supplies. I uploaded them to chatgbt and asked it to simplify it by combining duplicates and putting it in bullet format that was easily copy pastable. Did it in 30 seconds with minor tweaking and made my back to school shopping so much easier.
and what the fuck does that have to do with predatory companies cramming unneeded avenues of fucking predation into EVERYTHING?!
Here’s an AI summary of your distain for AI:
I’ll begin saying this when people ask why I want “dumb” machines.
AI summaries lack quality, ads distract drivers, you want a washing machine without ads, you don’t want your TV to watch you, you want machines to be submissive.
How did I do?
You did well.
This message is grok generated and posted automatically, clank clank clank.
If they can in a crash, they can blame it on the advertisers’ distraction. Insurers will love that.
I call on all hackers to defeat this parasitic disease from incorporating our everyday lives only to make money for its creators. Ads are a fucking disease and needs to be contrroled from entering our lives without our permission.
I call on all consumers to buy used old vehicles that don’t do shit like this.
I call on all Americans to start the revolution so we can treat the disease instead of the symptoms.
Stellantis is a Dutch group. If we head to Michigan and get the CEO, they’ll just appoint a new one… Unless you’re suggesting the Americans invade the Netherlands…
🤘🤘🤘🤘
I mean tear down and replace this government so the balance of power shifts back to the people and we can bring the corporations to heel.
And take it one step further so that whoever wants to check on it will see the ads playing even though no ads are playing.
Stellantis doing Stellantis things…
It’s remarkable that anyone buys Dodge/Ram/Chrysler/Jeep given how crappy Stellantis has been.
Remind me later.
GM was talking pretty publicly about doing this a couple years ago and there was a mild dust up over it. They also mentioned enthusiasm over the potential revenue to come from mining and selling driver data (which got them sued) . Last I heard about it was late 2023 or early 2024, so it seems their new data team.has been busy.
Don kid yourselves though, if GM is doing it, everyone else is or will be.
The field that marketing companies truly excel at the most is advertising their own services. Researching the effectiveness of advertising is difficult because most of the information is presented by the marketing companies themselves. However, most scientific studies agree that advertising through environmental means is ineffective and sometimes can even be harmful to brands.
Marketing usually aims to take advantage of impulsive purchasing behaviour by inundating the potential purchasers environment with advertisement. However, this isn’t very effective, most people automatically filter these kinds of ads, or worse are actively annoyed by them. Effective advertising activates the buyers impulsive behavior by engaging with them emotionally, which is why ad space for podcasts and other types of para social relationships are more effective.
I’d say the vast majority of data scraped from personal devices are utilized as tools to market the idea of advertisement to vendors more than they are used to actually market products. Imo marketing is useless for most types of businesses, and is mostly a field of self perpetuating scam artist.
Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).
In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.
we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).
Sounds like a perfect pitch to sell more ads. Like I said, I would hesitate to actually trust any statistical analysis of the effectiveness of advertising done by the same people wanting to sell more ads.
In a capitalist economy there’s just not a real motivation for researching advertising unless you are a marketing agency. So the vast majority of information is intrinsically biased.
I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.
The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.
I agree that it seems most marketing firms are seemingly scamming businesses at this point. The internet is so saturated with absolute garbage ads that anyone buying ads must be expecting $0.001 return on the ad dollar.
