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.
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.
Capitalism will innovate!
Capitalism:
If they can in a crash, they can blame it on the advertisers’ distraction. Insurers will love that.
Remind me later.
It’s an ad to call a phone number, are people buying things on the phone like this?
If someone were, it’s someone getting the latest model Ram.
The odds of a Ram 1500 driver drunk-dialling the number on the popup ad blocking their backup cam is low… but never zero!
You just tap the “call” button, you do t type the number.
Still dumb, though.
Stellantis doing Stellantis things…
It’s remarkable that anyone buys Dodge/Ram/Chrysler/Jeep given how crappy Stellantis has been.
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.
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.
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.
Hasnt Jeep being doing this since at least last year? Every time you stop at a light or whatever you get an ad for Sirus radio.
Bill Burr calls it, “driving an iPad”
It’s Bill Burr’s 21st century and we’re all just living in it.
He’s crushing it on Star Wars stuff, his comedy is on fucking fire, and weirdly he’s one of a small axis of Americans (bad word choice lol) who has the backbone to resist our descent into fascism. I agree with him and I fuckin hate it, bring back buttons, I don’t’ want to drive an iPad.
That website isn’t one to judge. I opened it up and there’s huge ad overlay immediately lol.
That’s how I pay server costs :)
Feel free to use ad block, doesn’t hurt my feelings one bit. AdBlock Plus is still good. I’m shocked to meet a programmer who doesn’t already block ads TBH!
No adblock…?
This is just terrible. Every aspect of life doesn’t need ads. I don’t care if it makes a company money or not.
Welcome to the second-to-last stage of capitalism.
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.
This is why my old shitty 2001 accord will always be best.
Scammy ads for scammy people driving scammy cars.
They’re the first victims of what will inevitably be rolled out to every new vehicle.
I own a 2016 RAM…and love it. Oh and Fuck you.
So you are part of the problem.