CAR!!!
Sorry folks, I hit publish to soon. You might have seen this one by accident. If you read it already, you get a a day off reading. :-) *
When I was a kid, we played outside. In the street. Cars would drive by, we’d yell, “CAR!” and move to the side. Our parents, who loved us, weren’t worried. We didn’t wear helmets when we biked. Made our own playdates just by going outside. Never had a cell phone. And, played in the backs of moving station wagons without car seats or seatbelts. It was a simpler time.
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A time before Walmart uses AI to help us search while we shop. Or, before we could climb aboard a flying car. Or, before beautytech became a hashtag. All that can only mean one thing. CES is on. Companies big and small are showing off some wild tech.
To me the biggest thing isn’t one thing. It’s where a lot of things converge. And, for me, this year, it’s cars.
BMW has a car with pixelated paint. You can set one of many zones to just about any color. So, your car can look like this.
VW put ChatGPT into their cars so you can have “enriching conversations.” Will.i.am (he’s a singer who thinks up new tech, ICYMI) created an app that pairs music to the sounds and rhythms of your car. What?!?! So, if you’re idling at a light, it will find a song that has a synchronous beat. What!?!?
Other than being in and around cars, it’s hard to see a pattern in the colors, voices, and pulses. But here it is.
We spent the last nearly twenty years personalizing the phone. First, we choose simple things like ringtones. Remember when a chime would cost a couple of bucks? Today, we choose the picture for the lock screen. Our apps. It houses our contacts, our pictures, our wallet. It’s were we connect with our friends and family. It’s how we trade stocks. Where we consume media. It is the hub of pretty much every part of our life.
Back when we still used flipped phones, I worked for a guy who saw all this unfolding. Years before the iPhone. Years before the Blackberry, this guy said, we would fall in love with this device. Because, “It would be ours.” He would get excited sharing his vision of the future. Holding a Motorola phone while pacing rapidly. This wasn’t choreographed or scripted. This wasn’t an Apple product launch. This was a genuine peyote-inspired vision quest sans the peyote.
Yes, this is a Bill Grimes story. My former boss and media genius. The guy who launched ESPN and who taught me about media. But boy did he nail it.
I’m going to channel my inner Bill. If I could pick up a car and wander around it, I would. “The car is going to become ours.” We’re going to choose its color to fit our mood. Talk to it. Command it. Load the apps we want into it. Play our media there. Drive through drive-thrus and our AI in it will suggest things. “Charles, skip the Big Mac today. You’re looking a little doughy and you have dinner plans tonight.” The sensors that track road traffic will transmit payments. All of this will happen while tracks play to the rhythm of your life’s moment.
So, what happens when cars become personal? It becomes the next media theater. The biggest players are going to battle for in-car supremacy. And, with media, comes ads. Ugh.
It makes too much sense not to happen. It will take twenty years until cars can drive us around (safely) while popping corn and playing a heads-up movie on what used to be the front window. Until then, media and ads will have to be more pedestrian.
But that’s still a whole lot more effective than digital ads today. This is a jump into moment for publishers. A few weeks ago, I wrote that publishers could use AI to help their consumers search. Walmart beat them to it. Apple’s Car Play works in nine out of ten cars. Few publishers have in-dash apps. So, get to auto-media before it’s cluttered and too late.
Digital ads are drying up for all but the mega players — cookies, lack of first-party data, bot traffic, ineffective creative, fatigue, ad blindness, ad blocking, the list goes on and on and on and on some more.
Is it just me or is anyone else feeling Lose Yourself?
*It happens to everyone.