Waze debuts new feature where celebrities give you driving directions
Now you can have a celebrity give you driving directions. — Waze is partnering with Universal Pictures to roll out a celebrity voice navigation feature. The first celebrity to guide you from point A to point B is comedian and actor Kevin Hart.
Context & Ripple Effects
The pickup on this story was unusually broad — Gizmodo, Engadget, TechRadar, BGR India, Tech in Asia, VCPOST, iPhone Hacks and Globes all ran it within a day — signaling that a free-navigation app landing a studio marketing deal read as more than a gimmick. It lands three days after Waze confirmed its arrival on Windows Phone, part of a stretch where the company is pushing distribution across platforms.
For Universal Pictures, the move extends a playbook the studio's marketing department already ran with the @WhatTedSaid Twitter account promoting 'Ted' in 2012: put the property inside channels audiences already use daily rather than buying interruptions. Waze had also been a confirmed contributor of crowd-sourced traffic data to Apple's iOS 6 Maps in 2012, so its data plumbing was already embedded beyond its own app.
First-order effects
- Kevin Hart's recorded directions give Waze a novelty hook to drive installs and session frequency at zero media cost, while Universal gets a captive, location-aware audience hearing promotion tied to its film slate.
Second-order effects
- Rival navigation apps face pressure to treat the voice layer as content real estate — signing their own celebrity or character packs — and studios gain a new promotional SKU alongside social campaigns like the Ted Twitter push.
Third-order effects
- If voice-pack deals become routine, turn-by-turn navigation consolidates into a dual-sided platform: drivers get personality, brands get audio reach inside a high-attention moment, shifting the app's value from pure routing utility toward a monetizable media surface.
The trend: Utility apps are opening their interface layers to entertainment-brand partnerships, converting everyday functional moments — driving directions among them — into branded-content inventory.