Vehicular Ad Slaughter

Advertising today is basically a floater in the eye of every consumer. No matter where we look we can always see it. There are times of respite from the ads, sleeping or sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool in full scuba gear for example, but very rarely are there instances of being free from ads when there’s a screen within eyeshot. One tech startup would like to make those instances even rarer.

Meet Tim Healy, founder and CEO of Idle Ads (or IA), whose company looks to realize the vision of adding even more ad space to a human existence already dominated by nonstop ads.

“One of the greatest entrepreneurial achievements of this century,” says Healy, “is the commoditization of people’s attention. All you have to do to make bank is find a time or space where a person doesn’t have an ad in their face and figure out how to put one there. It’s the capitalist dream in action!”

The market for forcing advertisements on people just trying to live their lives seems well beyond oversaturated. How then does Healy and IA expect to gain traction in this crowded industry?

“I got the idea while I was driving home from poker night at Deep Dish Dom’s place,” says Healy. “Mind you, I’m half in the bag at this point, so I’m careful to actually stop at the lights to avoid getting pulled over or whatever.”

Okay, weird way to start an elevator pitch, but go on….

“So I’m stopped at this red light and it’s taking forever and a day! I’m looking at my dashboard screen and it’s just telling me the time and the name of the Hoobastank song playing, nothing useful to me at the moment. So I pick up my phone from my lap to see what’s happening on Reddit or whatever and that feet-washing Jesus ad shows up on my feed, and I look at it and at the dashboard screen and think like ‘this should be on there!’. It was like lightning struck my brain, and even the blaring horn and flashing high beams of the truck behind me letting me know the light had turned green wasn’t enough to push the idea out of my head!

“The next day I talked to some friends about putting a team together, hit up my uncle Roy for a few hundred grand in seed money, and we were on our way!”

What exactly, we asked, were they on their way to?

“Well, think about it this way: The average person spends a whopping six-plus years of their life at red lights, railroad crossings, etc,” [Editor’s note: Please don’t take these guys at their word. Fact check literally everything they say], “and the key to modern advertising is finding yourself a captive audience and then selling their time to a third party. So putting those things together, what Idle Ads does is identify those times when a car is running but not in operation and sends ads directly to drivers’ dash screens!”

We looked into IA’s business plan and found that the company intends to use AI (or more accurately the generative text crap the tech industry is referring to as “AI”) to determine when a car is going to be stopped for an extended period of time, at which point an advertisement will play on the car's dashboard monitor and through the speakers, overriding anything else the driver might be listening to.

“It really just detects when the car’s brake pedal has been depressed for more than like fifteen seconds and then shuts off once you step on the gas again,” says Healy when we asked how the AI algorithm worked and why it was necessary, “but investors love when you say something is run on AI. You want that sweet VC money you gotta have AI. Really gets their noodles moist.”

Okay, I’m not going to ask what that last part means.

The business plan goes on to specify that content could be geared toward a driver’s location or habits to create targeted ads. One example it gives is that a dash screen might run a Dunkin Donuts ad and then point out, using gps, that there’s a Dunkin at the next light “you can totally stop at”.

Location data can also be used, the plan continues, to send targeted ads based on places you've just left. Leaving a bar? Well, you might see ads for Mentos (to help fool that traffic officer), personal injury attorneys, or bail bondsmen. I'd you're walking out of a strip club you might receive ads for florists or laundry detergent (oh gross, I just got that one).

Wait, why are these all shady places? Who are these examples geared towards? Oh right, finance bros. Guy knows his audience I guess.

Another example mentioned is that dash screen advertising is perfect for car insurers, already heavy advertisers on literally every possible medium. These would target unsafe drivers by sending ads featuring “that horrible Flo woman” (the business plan’s words, not mine) saying things like “We saw you rolled a stop sign back there, maybe it’s time to revisit your coverage!” or “that stupid Geico lizard thing” (again, not my words even though it is stupid) saying “With all this speeding, you should save enough time on your commute to give us fifteen minutes to save you fifteen percent on your car insurance!”.

A key feature, as stated in the plan, is that the Idle Ads system cannot be turned off.

“It’s not like drivers are totally free from seeing ads already,” says Healy. “There’s still billboards and fast food signs all over the place, not to mention those sweet ass trucks lined with LED panels, but all that tends to just blend into the scenery. But an unskippable ad that plays on a screen a couple feet from your face? Now that’s much harder to ignore! And yeah, of course you can’t turn it off. Who would ever leave that thing on if they had the option not to?”

That sentiment does bring up the question though of how to sell people on a service they’re guaranteed to hate.

“Yeah, okay Peggy Olson,” quips Healy, “only nobody sells to customers anymore. That's such a twentieth century mindset, bro. You wanna make money today, you gotta realize that the customers are the product, advertisers are the customer, and the only people you gotta please are the shareholders. Real entrepreneurs recognize that!”

Sounds like you're more of a middleman than an entrepreneur, but we won’t argue semantics.

So what are the odds that Idle Ads could be coming to a dashboard near you?

Well, as it turns out, car companies are already recording your driving habits and selling the data to your insurance company, enabling them to justify jacking up your rates at any time. We'd say the likelihood of them passing on this idea is about as likely as any corporation when offered the chance to sell the same product twice.

But IA isn't without its decriers. The Federal Highway Administration worries that the ads might be triggered in times of traffic congestion or when one is waiting to merge onto a fast-moving road, causing distractions. The administration also theorizes that the average American finds Geico and Progressive ads so annoying that many are likely to just blow through red lights altogether, risking a ticket and lives just to avoid seeing one. Sadly, the legislation that would make advertising car insurance illegal, known as the “Everyone Hates This Shit Bill”, has failed to gain traction and is likely to die in committee.

Former Transportation Secretary Angela Chao was also publicly against the idea, though she was recently murdered by a Tesla in what we're being instructed to say was a separate incident and also probably not murder. We tried to contact current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg but were told by an intern that they're having a hard enough time getting him to focus on “this whole Boeing kerfuffle” and it's best not to distract him right now.

Personally, we feel our car skidding off an icy bridge while Zach Braff and Donald Faison sing about their amazing T-Mobile coverage would be the perfect way for our life to end as death is the only escape from this capitalist hellscape and it would be so apt for our last moments to be overlaid with advertising. But that’s just us.

So to answer the question from before, yes, the odds are very good and Tim Healy is ready to bank on that.

“Oh, it's happening,” he says. “People don't really own their cars, or anything else for that matter, so there's not a whole lot they can do about it. We're actually already looking into other things people don't really own to advertise on.

“How about ads for Colgate in your bathroom mirror because you really only rent your home? Or ads for DoorDash that play through speakers inside a sofa you're still making payments on? Or maybe ads for Charmin from your… wait, do people own their toilets? Well look into that. The point is that if you can have it but not own it we can put an ad in it! Except refrigerators, someone already beat us to that.”

Like a car accident on the side of the road, you may find it hard to look away from Idle Ads, unfortunately probably coming to a dash screen near you. And it's not just drivers who will be unable to take their eyes off this startup but the advertising industry itself.

“It's going to be the next big thing in marketing,” says Healy, “just watch.”

Well I guess we're going to have to.