BMW recently placed a promotion for the new Spider-Man film on its vehicles’ dashboards. When drivers started the car, a banner appeared on the control display. Tapping it launched a 19-second animation with music and a light show delivered through the car’s ambient lighting system.
Many owners were not amused. Some objected to receiving promotional content inside a vehicle they had already paid for. The reaction was sharpened by comments a BMW executive made in 2023, when he said he could not envision the company selling its screens for commercials because the cabin was “a private space.”
BMW maintains that the Spider-Man activation was an optional experience tied to a larger film partnership, not an advertisement. But lost in the backlash to BMW’s Spider-Man stunt was an important question: Did the car-based campaign actually drive ticket sales?
While Eric Seufert’s “everything is an ad network” mantra keeps being proven correct, a new truism is also taking shape: “Wherever an advertising business emerges, the measurement challenge follows.”
Eyeballs + data = Advertising opportunity
The underlying logic behind the “everything is an ad network” theory is straightforward. Any company that controls enough attention already possesses the foundation of a media business. First-party data increases the value of that attention by making it addressable based on what they have watched, searched for or purchased (not to mention where they have traveled in their car).
This logic has transformed retail through the retail media network (RMN) revolution. Companies that once made money primarily from selling products now operate high-margin media businesses built around their customer relationships. It has also changed streaming. Netflix resisted advertising for years before introducing an ad-supported tier as a new source of growth. ChatGPT has since begun moving through a similar monetization cycle. RMN, CTV and LLMs are the fastest-growing media channels today.
These shifts were all inevitably preceded by doubts and denials, often from the sellers themselves. Companies can and often do resist advertising because it feels inconsistent with the product experience they want to provide, but that position becomes harder to maintain when they are sitting on a valuable source of revenue. A disappointing quarter or a new growth mandate changes the calculation quickly.
The car is a natural extension of this pattern. Modern vehicles are increasingly organized around connected digital interfaces. Their screens are getting larger, and the software inside them can be updated long after the vehicle leaves the dealership. Automakers also have direct customer relationships that extend across years of ownership. This fertile ground gets more promising when you consider that autonomous driving will eventually free up more of the attention currently occupied by the road.
That makes the car a legitimate advertising environment in the future. But making it a durable advertising channel requires solving the measurement half of the equation.
Selling inventory is only half the battle
BMW and Sony may know how many vehicles received the Spider-Man banner. They can presumably see how many drivers tapped it and completed the animation. Those metrics describe engagement with the placement. They do not necessarily reveal whether anyone bought a movie ticket because of it, whether the activation created incremental value or how its contribution compared with the rest of the film’s media campaign.
Consumer reaction – the perceived value exchange – belongs in that measurement calculus as well. Someone who knowingly chooses a cheaper, ad-supported Netflix subscription has entered an understood exchange. An advertisement appearing inside a purchased vehicle creates a different experience. Advertisers need a way to account for those differences instead of assuming that all impressions are created equal.
The setting changes the meaning of the impression. A promotion shown while a car is parked may produce a very different response from a message that interrupts access to navigation or another vehicle control. BMW limited the full animation to stationary vehicles, which illustrates how important context will be as the channel develops.
How new channels become endemic
Every new ad network increases the need for measurement that can connect the resulting fragments. Advertisers need to understand how an exposure contributed to an outcome and whether it created value beyond the rest of the campaign. They also need to compare that contribution with channels competing for the same budget.
Measurement is what turns experimental inventory into an endemic part of the media plan. Mobile advertising attracted serious performance budgets once the infrastructure emerged to measure outcomes across a fragmented app ecosystem. CTV is working through the same process today. As I have argued previously in the context of LLM advertising, early spending follows audience growth and novelty. But long-term investment follows comparability.
The BMW campaign has already proven that an automaker can place promotional content on the screen inside a connected vehicle. The question now is the same one that eventually confronts every new advertising channel: Did it work, and how do we know?
Until the industry can answer that question with the same rigor applied elsewhere in the media plan, Spider-Man on the dashboard remains an experiment. Once it can, the car becomes another ad network.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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