For everyone · 5 min read · Updated October 2026

How Lunar matches drivers with local businesses

How drivers and local brands get paired: Lunar's team makes each offer, zones are matched by radius, drivers can decline, and no car carries the same business twice.

Lunar's matching answers one question from both sides at once: which brand goes on which car? The short version — a driver names local businesses they'd genuinely like to carry, Lunar's team looks at those first when they're on Lunar, then at overlap between the driver's driving zones and the business's target area, then at the same city, and every match goes out as an offer the driver can accept or decline. Add a short veto window for businesses and a no-duplicates rule per car, and that's the whole machine. Here's how each piece works and why it's built that way.

The inventory: one car, four spots

Every car on Lunar carries up to four circle stickers — front and rear doors, both sides, no hood. Drivers choose how many of the four spots to fill (one to four, no minimum), and each spot holds a different business: never two stickers of the same brand on one car. For a business, 'five cars' means your sticker on five different vehicles, spreading your presence across five different daily routines rather than concentrating it on one.

Step one: the driver names businesses to carry

At signup, drivers name local businesses they'd be glad to represent. That's a preference, not an application or a promise: Lunar's team looks at those businesses first when they're on Lunar. This 'warm intent' layer is deliberate: a sticker someone is glad to carry is an endorsement, not just ad space, and it's why a Lunar car reads differently to neighbours than a wrapped taxi. Businesses can lean into it — inviting your own customers to sign up as drivers is a cheap way to build brand advocacy, though a match is never guaranteed — and it's covered in what a Lunar sticker looks like on a real car.

Step two: geography does the heavy lifting

Each driver sets a driving zone — a point and radius covering where they actually live and drive. Each business sets a target zone the same way. Lunar's team looks for matches where the two overlap, which is the entire point of hyper-local advertising: a coffee shop in East Vancouver gets cars that drive East Vancouver, not a car an hour away in Surrey. Zone overlap is how Lunar looks for a fit in both live markets, Vancouver and Tulsa, and it's what makes the impressions estimate meaningful — miles driven in-zone are worth more to a local brand than miles anywhere else.

Step three: Lunar's team matches from the paying pool

Offers for the remaining spots come from businesses with active campaigns in overlapping zones, and then in the same city. This is the fairness layer: every paying advertiser is considered for cars, including the dry cleaner nobody thought to name. Matching respects the no-duplicate rule and each business's committed term (3 or 6 months), so brands get continuity instead of churn.

Accept or decline: drivers keep a say

• Every match is an offer that holds for 48 hours, and the driver can accept or decline it.
• Declining is free and unlimited, and a declined business isn't offered to that driver again for 30 days — the campaign keeps running, just on another car.
• After a driver accepts, the business has 24 hours to veto the match. Silence counts as approval, and the sticker kit prints and ships only after that window closes.
• Content rules sit above all of it: nothing lewd or provocative goes on anyone's car in the first place.

Declining matters because willing carriers are better carriers — a driver who resents a sticker takes worse care of it, parks it in the garage, and quits sooner. Letting drivers say no keeps the whole marketplace honest.

What happens when things change

Matching isn't static. A driver leaves? The business is rematched by Lunar, and the 30-day count pauses while no car is carrying its sticker, so it isn't charged for those days. A campaign ends? The spot opens for the next advertiser in the zone. A driver's sticker gets damaged? Reprint, reship, re-verify. Businesses are reminded 30, 14 and 3 days before a term ends, and drivers get at least 14 days' notice, so continuing is a tap, not a renegotiation.

Why this design beats an open marketplace

Pure driver choice would leave unpicked businesses with no cars; pure assignment would put brands on resentful drivers. Lunar's approach takes the best of both: the businesses a driver names are looked at first and every offer can be declined, while Lunar's team matches from the paying pool so every advertiser is considered for cars. And because verification — VIN, install photos, weekly odometers — sits underneath it all, both sides can trust that a match on paper is a real sticker on a real car, actually driving the neighbourhood it was matched to.