It's ridiculous on a smaller phone, on my SE these ads for fast food and gas takes up most of the screen. Also ironic considering waze is a pretty locked down app regarding preventing the driver from being distracted and fiddling with it on the fly. If I'm hungry I'll punch something in, and if I need gas I'll stop at any of the half dozen stations on the side of the road, not because of a waze ad. In fact I'll probably start subconsciously avoiding these places that are ruining my navigation experience.

While you are probably right that its dumb, this would have totally made me go to KFC on weekends when I half heartedly drive around to a destination.

But how likely are you to use Waze when you are half heartedly driving around to a destination? I mostly use Waze when I care about finding the fastest route somewhere (because I feel it has some of the most up to date traffic info), which is when I would least want a detour to some other business along the way.

And sometimes for driving long distances to get notifications of things along the way (like speed traps). In those cases I guess I could use ads for where to stop and eat but since Waze only shows ads when stopped (as far as I can tell) the likelihood of it showing me something relevant at the right time I’d want to grab a bite to eat while cruising down the highway seems unlikely.

The only value I see in it is reminding me that oh yeah there is a KFC around here maybe I should try it next time. And maybe they have some way to show attribution there (after all they have location info so maybe they can see how many people go to that business within a certain number of days of seeing an ad, or after a certain number of exposures to the ad).

Waze is a Google app.