Earlier today, my honorable colleague by the name of Freddy “Tavarish” Hernandez said that wrapping your car in a giant advertisement is an “awesome idea.” Freddy “Tavarish” Hernandez is wrong. Remarkably wrong. So wrong it hurts my goddamn face.
Freddy’s screed was in opposition to a blog post by The Drive decrying the practice of wrapping your car in an ad because it “erod[es] your soul.” I don’t necessarily agree on the reasoning there, but our conclusion is the same. Call it a concurring opinion.
Go ahead and read Freddy’s blog if you want (though I suggest you don’t because Freddy is wrong), but the crux of the argument appears to be that it doesn’t matter if wrapping your car in an ad erodes your soul, because your soul is for sale:
If putting an ad on your car dehumanizes you, then the same applies to any piece of clothing you wear with a prominent logo. Advertising happens on various levels, from un-skippable annoying pop-up ads on your favorite free porn site, to the HEMI badge your neighbor paid the dealer to put on his base model Dodge Charger to impress the guys at the office. An advertising company discovering a way to increase exposure for other companies, entities, or events isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and most importantly, it has absolutely no bearing on the person driving the car in this case.
And maybe your soul is for sale! And maybe that doesn’t matter! Who cares, right? It’s your soul, after all, sully it to bits!
Weirdly enough, I agree. But this ain’t about you, see. This is about me.
When you wrap your car in some dumb, poorly-color-schemed, hackneyed ad, it means I have to see it. It means every time I get in a car, and happen to see your stupid face on the road, I also have to see your stupid ad-fueled shitbox telling me to buy cheese or outsource my human resources or “manage my data,” whatever that means. And nobody wants to see that. Smarter states, like Vermont, even go out of their way to forbid billboards by the side of the road.
“Oh ho ho!” you say, because you think you’re smarter than some jamoke on the Internet. “Don’t I have to see ads when I go on http://www.jalopnik.com? Isn’t that the exact same thing?”
No, dipshit. It’s not the same thing. You have to go out of your way to go type http://www.jalopnik.com into your favorite World Wide Web Browser, and then we give you blogs to read in exchange for your seeing our ads. It’s called the social contract.
But when I have to see an ad on your car? You’re providing nothing to the world, save for pollution. So you’re actually making things even worse.
You have a choice to come here, is what I’m saying. But do I have a choice to avoid your car? Not in a million years, because the nature of the universe if that whenever I happen to step outside my house, that’s where you’ll just happen to be, with your stupid face and your stupid ad-wrapped car.
The ad-wrapping company, unoriginally named Wrapify, says they’ll be collecting GPS data about each wrapped car, thus maximizing the amount of dollar$$$ you can make for the company. But really, they should be doing something else with all that location data. They should be providing it to the rest of the world, as a service, to offset the effect of everyone else having to see their dumb ads on your dumb car that your dumb body is driving.
And maybe that way, we won’t have to see any of it at all.
Image credit: Jim Cooke/Jalopnik
Contact the author at ballaban@jalopnik.com.
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