No, Sony didn't pay BMW $300 million to put a Spider-Man promo in every car
Maybe I spend too much time online, but it felt like my entire timeline yesterday was dunking on BMW for putting a Spider-Man advertisement inside its cars.
For those who haven’t seen it, BMW did a marketing deal with Sony/Marvel that places a promo video for the new Spider-Man movie on the center display of certain vehicles. This led to pushback online. Just two years after BMW said it would never sell in-vehicle advertisements because your car is a “private space,” the luxury car manufacturer has apparently gone back on its word. This also comes just a few years after the company famously tried to implement a subscription service for heated seats, and the stock is now down 40% year-to-date.
Some of this pushback is warranted. No one wants to buy a product and then also become the product themselves. But I also think the reaction is overblown. I even saw some people saying BMW got $300 million for this deal, which is inaccurate.
So for today’s newsletter, I’m going to explain how these deals actually work, why BMW did it, and how the entire campaign links back to a successful marketing deal BMW negotiated three decades ago.