In-car advertising — In-car advertising operator

The problem

Selling advertising on screens inside vehicles only works if every screen is playing the right thing and the driver cannot break it. A general-purpose tablet in a car is one stray tap from being something else entirely, and an operator cannot send someone out to each vehicle to put it back.

What we built

An Android kiosk app running locked to a single app on tablets fitted in vehicles. Advertising plays continuously on the passenger-facing screen, and drivers pause or resume through a PIN-gated panel rather than by leaving the app. Playback and campaigns are managed centrally, so changing what a fleet is showing is one operation rather than one per vehicle.

The long version

The hard part of this one is not playing video. It is that the device is unattended, in someone else’s vehicle, in the hands of a driver whose job is driving and not running a media player. The home button, the notification shade, the app switcher: everything that makes an Android tablet pleasant to own becomes a failure mode when the tablet is an advertising asset someone has been sold airtime on.

So the app runs as a locked-down single-app kiosk, and the one thing a driver legitimately needs to do, pausing the screen, is behind a PIN rather than behind exiting to the launcher. The airport transfer partnership is what set the bar: the screens are in front of arriving passengers on the way into a city, which is a fixed audience at a fixed moment, and an advertiser paying for that moment is paying for the screen to be working when it happens.