Or is not a new thing and I’ve just missed them? Are there fewer drivers? Bad PR?
They’ve done billboard ads in the NYC region in the past. Dunno about television commercials, which is what I assume you mean.
Some municipalities have been going after Uber for quite some time: that they have amateur drivers doing what regulations require being limited to professionals with special licenses and/or who pay a fee for the privilege, that they exploit a labor force and avoid taxes or other requirements of employers by pretending these are individual gigs that are just arranged by the company Uber, and a host of other things. Behind the scenes, I have to suspect that a lot of it is due to traditional taxi companies losing their shit about losing their business.
Where are these alleged commercials appearing? What media and what geography? What features are they touting?
In the last week I read an article (that I can’t now find dammit) saying that Uber now represented some 80+% of the rideshare market while Lyft has stagnated around 10%. Although I’m not recalling whether that was US-only stats, or worldwide, or what.
In any case, to the degree there’s a format war going on here, VHS Uber won hands down. Not sure why a winner would be advertising.
Although having had my car in the shop for a couple weeks in April and therefore using Uber/Lyft a bunch, I could sure see that our “need” for two cars for wife & I is getting kinda superfluous. We could easily replace the second car with Uber/Lyft and almost certainly save a material amount of money every month.
Perhaps what you’re seeing and we’re all about to see is uber/lyft decide their real competition is the second car in all those households and their path to growth is to get us all to get rid of those second cars.
Upstate New York, regular TV. They were basically selling it as a flexible “choose your own hours” job. I will see if I can find a clip or sample.
Ahh. There is a big difference between Uber advertising for customers and Uber advertising for “employees” who aren’t really employees. You left that part out of the OP.
From Uber’s POV, the right number of drivers is far too many. Uber wins when the wait time for a ride is negligible. Especially in other than dense urban areas where folks are used to driving, not waiting for public transportation. Delivering short wait times in that situation takes having lots of idle drivers on duty spread everywhere.
So, it wasn’t an ad to encourage ridership, it sounds like – it was an ad to recruit new drivers.
From what I can find, they suffer from a lot of driver churn, in part because drivers often don’t make a lot of money (a situation that likely is made worse by high gasoline prices).
Yeah, I worded the OP rather clumsily. Sorry!
No sweat. Half the fun of these threads is teasing out the actual issue. That we got there in less than 10 posts instead of the usual 20 is a win! 
I don’t think I’ve really watched TV in 12 years or listened to radio in a few but I get a lot of online advertising, and I do get some for Uber driving. I get a lot more for Doordash and Instacart. As mentioned in another reply, they can never have too many contractors for these gigs. They make sure there is coverage for the orders/riders and the gig workers fight over the (often below minimum wage, but people who don’t understand things like FICA, taxes, and that your gross income is really only your profits, don’t really get this) jobs.
Upstate New York is a bad location for attracting drivers. I remember a couple of years ago they did a study here and found that most of the trips were made to and from the small number of nightclubs that the city offers, with the airport being the only other big draw.
Of course covid destroyed those venues for a while. They may be coming back, but the workforce would have been decimated. (So much for anyone touting the gig economy as the coming Future.) I can see how Uber would be needing to resort to desperate measures to get new drivers for a very uncertain position.