Waze Zooms In

It was a hot day today, like most people I found myself contemplating ways to stay cool and keep my little ones busy. Although, I didn’t have much time. I found time to take in the new Pixar Cars 3 with my family. My son knew the release date and has been asking for the past few days. Being that I am a Disney fan, I was also curious to watch the film as I’m a fan of their movies. As I began watching the film, I remembered a conversation I had earlier in the week with a friend who said she had used Waze in her commute in to work and had Lightning McQueen, star car from Cars guide navigate her into work that morning. She said that it was a fun experience and couldn’t wait to use the application with her children in the car and see the movie.
If you’re not familiar with Waze it’s a community-based traffic and navigation application that shares real-time traffic and road conditions information. The company is owned by Google (Waze, 2017). The information is shared with all and helps save many people time. Waze is pretty helpful and very easy to use. Waze offers advertisers different types of advertising opportunities, just recently they partnered with Pixar for the launch of their new movie, Cars 3. The partnership allows Waze users to change the image of their car on the app to Lightning McQueen main character of Cars and or Jackson Storm, his rival from the movie.
This is the first time the application allows full integration in the character experience. What that means is the voice navigating you will be the voice of the character, your vehicle will also have a picture of the vehicle you selected. Waze had a similar campaign for the summer Olympics where users were able to change their flags only. However, Waze says this partnership with Pixar is different as they’re helping provide the “full character experience” (Kaplan, 2017). For the first time the brand is fully integrating the experience and is also creating a value for their consumers as they cannot get this type of experience anywhere else. Pixar is behind the project as they hope to drive engagement and also want to create a fun brand experience for its audience (Kaplan, 2017). For those that are users of the application regular the partnerships introduce them to their application and the characters of the movie, hopefully engaging them to want to go and take in the film. As for those that are fans of the movie, this campaign creates an opportunity to create a buzz around the film. If you are not a fan or familiar with the film, just seeing it on the application may stimulate your curiosity into wanting to learn more about it. Using technology like this is innovative and also demonstrates how traditional media is shifting gears and how technology is now a major component of media. I’m really interested in learning more and have begun to see full integrated campaigns across all platforms much more since beginning the course.
As for the film, it was a success with my two kids. My daughter who originally didn’t want to see the film, came out with a new perspective of the film. She even walked out with a new favorite character. My son was just as excited. The one thing they enjoyed most was listening to Lightning McQueen navigate us home. They were so excited and couldn’t get enough of the application.

Kaplan, D. (2017) Waze promotes Disney pixr’s cars 3 with character vices and custom images. Retrieved from http://www.geomarketing.com/waze-promotes-disney-pixars-cars-3-with-character-voices-and-custom-images

Waze (n.d) 2017 retrieved from Waze.com