Omni Automotive Advertising Blog

Advertising. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing ads everywhere we go. On TV and radio, in newspapers, on billboards, posters, walls, skywriting, movies, on cell phones, even on promotional pieces like pens and coffee mugs. Just when you thought ‘they’ couldn’t think of another way to advertise to you, along comes ‘telematics’.

As the technology inside your car has evolved it has opened up the door for advertisers to gather all the information they need to sell more products. The computer in the vehicle that controls your engine will be doing a whole lot more in the next few years. And while the cost of most new technologies are passed on to the consumer, the thought is that the cost of this will be placed on the advertisers themselves.

According to a report on The Detroit Free Press, todays consumers don’t necessarily want to pay for certain technologies. They already have cell phone and laptop computers. And younger buyers, who don’t have the budget of the older counterparts, aren’t willing to spend as much. Even then, neither really wants to pay for it at all. The fastest way to make sure that it gets into the vehicle is to have the advertiser pay for it.

A similar report on USNews.com points out that your vehicle computer is already tracking your gas mileage, your GPS knows where your going, where you went and how you got there.

As telematics ties into more sophisticated in-car computers it will be able to deliver important consumer information to advertisers who will in turn use it to target you, in your car, with product information based on your own habits. This is similar to the way you grocery store tracks your purchases. When you scan that little key fob at the register it knows to send you an email next week with similar on sale products. Very soon advertisers will be able to know if your car needs gas, what restaurants you eat at, what gas stations you go to.

Estimates for the number of cars that will have this type of technology installed five years from now is 50 million vehicles.