A recent walk through Pandora's Oakland, Calif., headquarters revealed an engineer sitting at his desk looking like a car mechanic. There, beside his computer, was a car radio console, which appeared to be going through its final round of tweaks before being okayed for the assembly line.
On the console's screen? Pandora, of course. The music streaming service will be in one third of all new cars shipped this year, according to Pandora director of product management Jack Krawczyk. The company's presence in connected cars is helping it think through what advertising in such cars will look like, giving it an early view into what will likely be an important advertising medium not too long from now.
Mr. Krawczyk shared the company's perspective on connected cars in front of four Beatles themed conference rooms (there was pre-release hardware in the room where the radio was being worked on, so we couldn't film there). His Twitter bio says he's "Trying to change advertising to not suck," and he told us how he plans to make that happen within cars.
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CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this story, Jack Krawczyk's name was misspelled.