What is this world coming to?

It seems as though everyday there is some sort of senseless violence happening no matter where you are. And recently in the safety of Singapore my wife was unfortunate enough to fall victim to this whilst reversing her car in an underground parking garage.

She’s fine so please don’t worry.

There she was just casually reversing her car when all of a sudden out of nowhere a “Pole” came out and attacked the back of the car, for no reason whatsoever.

And no, I am not talking about a person from Poland but more the metal kind. And in my wife’s case, more of the metal kind which is securely attached to the big white concrete pillar strategically wrapped with reflective tape and a warning sign for people reversing in the basement car park against these such attacks.

Really, what is this world coming to?

However as she says in her own defence it was raining that day. Yup, rain and yes underground parking lot. I know but let’s just go with this.

Anyway, so there I was explaining the senseless violence to the mechanic at the garage who I don’t think was buying into my story in it’s entirety during the various bouts of laughter. So to avoid any more laughter breaking out I broke eye contact and started paging through the nearest thing I could find on the table. 

The car classifieds. 

Now if you work in advertising and are worried that there is no longer a need for us in this ever changing world of communications. Don’t, you are fine.

You see the classifieds is what happens when you leave advertising to the general public. It’s in a worse state than my recently attacked car.

It was this exact thing that CarSales.com.au wanted to help the general public with. They believe that if you want to sell your car with confidence and ease you should have the ability to make a car ad as unique and exciting as the ones that you see on tv that cost millions of dollars.

So that’s what they did. They gave people the ability to have their very own car ad by creating the AutoAds by CarSales.

A series of ads created from hundreds of scenes, thousands of audio clips and a custom built algorithm to piece it all together. 

What you got was your very own unique one of a kind car ad.

How it worked was when you went onto their site and listed your car you were then prompted to make your own AutoAd. It was simple and easy. You could choose between the family ad, tough ad, city ad, adventure ad or their most successful one, the luxury car ad.

This logistical nightmare of having to shoot hundreds of scenarios, thousands of dialogue pieces whilst taking into account every name there is on the planet was made easier by the custom built algorithm that pieced it all together for them.

The algorithm not only combined the footage and audio but also took the data off your original posting, including your photographs of your car plus things like odometer readings and other information and combined it into a one of a kind car ad, just for you. 

It was such a success and within the first week there were over four hundred thousand unique car ads created. It has been estimated that over five thousand car ads are being created everyday off their cloud base platform and the amazing thing is no two ads are ever the same. 

The creators say that there could be over 1.2 Trillion unique ads created with the algorithm randomly reorganising footage, combining it with thousands of script dialogues and adding different user photographs every time.

But they didn’t stop there. Instead of this just living in the social space they also then used the same user generated ads on prime time tv and put some decent media money behind it.

Imagine that your own ad during prime time selling your very own banged up Toyota made possible by CarSales.\

Now if only that same algorithm could work in parking garages randomly placing and moving those mischievous “poles” as my wife casually reverses. Even better if someone could invent a noise or something that beeps whilst reversing warning you of something that is close by, hmmm.

For my sake, let’s just ignore that and let that one go too.

By the way, anyone want a banged up Honda?

I Wish I Had Done That.

Gary