The annoying ads come to haunt you in a new place: the back of an Uber.
The ride-sharing company plans to introduce full-length video ads to several of its platforms in the United States for the first time this week, it reports. The Wall Street Journal.
Riders will encounter ads of up to 90 seconds in length in the Uber app while waiting for pickup and during rides. Like New York taxis, which introduced TV screens in 2007, some Uber cars will have tablets that automatically play ads, the report said. W.S.J.
Video ads will also be added to Uber Eats and Drizly, an alcohol delivery service acquired by Uber for more than $1 billion (around €900 million at current exchange rates) in 2021. On Uber Eats, the ads will be will display while customers wait for their deliveries, and on Drizly, ads will play on search results pages.
The ‘delivery’ clings to ads to survive, but the large advertising groups anticipate a very difficult 2023
While this development isn’t exactly unexpected—Uber announced it would launch an advertising division to connect brands with customers in October—the move to start applying them so quickly shows how serious the company is about growing its business. from advertising to over $1 billion in sales by 2024.
Part of Uber’s proposition to brands is its stash of user data. The company has information about where its users go, how often they travel to their destinations, and how much time they spend in the car.
In March, the company launched a self-service advertising platform for small and medium-sized brands to access Uber billboards in major US cities, such as New York and Los Angeles. Since then it has grown to offer sponsored ads and emails, menu ads and banners in the app.
“We have 2 minutes of your attention,” he told the wsj Mark Grether, vice president and general manager of the advertising division of Uber Technologies. “We know where you are, we know where you’re going, we know what you’ve eaten.”
Grether added that Uber can use all of that data “to basically personalize a video ad for you.”
While riders will be able to opt out of ads that use their gender and ride history, they won’t be able to opt out of advertising entirely, an Uber spokeswoman told W.S.J.
Big retailers are also trying to get advertisers to spend more money on digital ads based on customer data. Last August, North American hypermarket giant Walmart jumped into the sponsored video advertising arena, launching a division to sell space across all of its digital channels.
