What happens to roadside billboards when we’re all in self-driving cars?
Out of home advertising is one of the fastest growing market sectors, but when our attention is no longer focused wholly on the road, will roadside OOH continue to deliver? Simon Lawson says "yes, more than ever".
If you believe the predictions, transportation is about to undergo the biggest revolution since the invention of the modern internal combustion engine in 1876.
According to Stanford University lecturer, Tony Seba, four technologies are about to change everything: solar power, battery storage, electric vehicles and self-driving cars.
What could the future look like?
Car ownership will be rare. Personal transport needs will instead be met by self-driving car options including Tesla’s newly proposed peer-to-peer car sharing platform, taxi companies like Uber and even the potential of fleets operated by manufacturers such as Ford and General Motors.
Physically, we’re going to move from the front seat to the back seat. That shift is important, it’ll mean less of our attention will be focused on the road ahead.
What’s this got to do with media? Well, what happens to roadside billboards when we’re all getting around in the back seat of self-driving cars?
Let’s back up for a moment and set some context.
According to the Standard Media Index, Australian media agencies booked some $801m of out-of-home media in the financial year ending June 2016. $271m, or 36%, of the total, was for posters and billboards – the type we typically drive past in our cars. It’s a big business and it’s getting bigger, with agency bookings growing 14.2% year on year.
Australia’s listed out-of-home media companies are stock market darlings at the moment, trading at steep price earnings multiples well above the Australian share market’s historical averages. Put simply, the market is factoring in significant and ongoing growth in earnings.
An important part of the industry’s growth story is the additional revenue opportunities that open up with the digitisation of large format roadside billboards. Basically, a sign can generate more revenue once it’s been digitised because multiple advertisers have to pay to have their ads displayed on rotation.
That model is all well and good when the majority of the audience are drivers paying attention to what’s happening outside of the car, but how does it stack up when the audience is in the back of a self-driving car looking at their smartphones?
It strikes me that self-driving cars could actually be more of an opportunity for the out-of-home industry than a threat.
Consider that if the future of media is a marketing cloud delivering programmed sequences of personalised messages across a series of user ID-enabled devices, then a potentially fatal weakness of outdoor is its present inability to target by user.
Smartphones connected to self-driving cars will change all that.
One example that demonstrates the personalisation potential of out-of-home is Uber’s partnership with Spotify that allows passengers to listen to their own playlists whilst riding in an Uber.
Take this concept a few steps further and you can easily imagine screens in the back of self-driving cars that customise to passengers upon their entry into the vehicle. Beyond that, there is the potential for self-driving cars to signal digital large format roadside billboards to display highly relevant messages to passengers as they travel past.
In today’s regulatory environment, the prospect of roadside signs serving personalised messages might seem farfetched, but this is largely due to the concerns of local council’s that moving digital screens might distract drivers and cause accidents. This objection is rendered moot when the drivers are no longer human.
With that said, it seems unlikely that self-driving cars will take over from human drivers completely and the concerns around distraction will remain: What then?
Augmented reality has the potential to completely transform the nature of roadside billboards. What’s to say that roadside billboards will even need to physically exist in the future?
Jaguar’s Virtual Windscreen concept shows how augmented reality can enable motorists to view a display on their windscreen of virtual racing lines that change colour to indicate optimum braking positions, virtual cones placed along the road to train drivers, and a ‘ghost car’ visualisation that allows drivers to race virtual drivers on a real road. (It makes more sense if you watch the video.)
Using the Jaguar example as our inspiration, why couldn’t the future include self-driving cars fitted with augmented reality windows that provide for the display of customised advertisements on virtual roadside billboards that appear as part of the natural landscape outside the vehicle?
Whilst it’s not certain how long it will be before a self-driving car world becomes a reality, with continuing investment by companies like Google, Tesla, Uber and potentially even Apple, it’s approaching faster than many of us probably realise.
Tony Seba, our eminent Stanford University lecturer, estimates conventional transportation will have been rendered obsolete in 15 years’ time. In his words: “It’s going to be over by 2030; it has started already.”
Simon Lawson is group business director at PHD Melbourne
People won’t be looking out at billboards, they’ll be looking at their phones like on public transport.
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I’ve been telling everyone the samething. The future autonomous vehicles don’t even need Windows. The passengers could be completely surrounded by AR. If ads will be a part of this, it won’t be outofhome companies. Even if it looks like a billboard. It will be a medium owned by the car manufactures. The screen inside your call all around you.
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Nothing, just as it is now. Billboards are a thing of the 80’s, pointless.
Spend your ‘advertising’ elsewhere. Stop polluting our skylines.
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Simon im an OOH Media owner and love your optimism.
How do you see the individualization of served content when there are dozens of other people passing at the same time ?
Secondly access to mobile phone owner data in Australia is somewhat limited by law . How do you see this being overcome ?
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Did you really just write that? must live on a deserted island!
FYI… Digital billboards weren’t with us in the 80s and are the fastest growing OOH media space in the world!
Take some time to learn about them it’s a very interesting change in our world as we know it, enjoy.
Your welcome.
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Hi Chris,
Thanks for your questions.
We’re talking a long way into the future, so it’s difficult to speculate with much accuracy, but the difficulties associated with your first question is one reason I tend to think that internal screens/augmented reality windows in self-driving cars are likely to become a primary DOOH delivery device for personalised messages. From a DOOH roadside perspective, advertisers could programmatically bid against one another to display messages relevant to defined segments who might use a section of road at a given time, or even bid for the opportunity to display a specific message to a specific passenger who is about to travel past.
On the mobile phone data question, we are already becoming less reliant on the phone companies and advances in apps, location services including beacons and the evolution of virtual personal assistants like Siri and Google Now are an indication of rapid development in this area. It’s likely the legal framework will continue to struggle to keep up with the technology.
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All I see in my head after reading this, is the movie ‘Minority Report’ where they have floating billboards, windows turned into screens, cars with internal personalised advertising and roadside rubbish bins changing their ads as you walk or drive past….argghhh!!!
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One of the interesting things about being alive today is that we can see, in quick succession, a bunch of disruptive technology.
Most of us weren’t around to see the Model T displace horses.
Extrapolating J Warner’s “who wants to hear actors talk?” dismissal of movie sound, we can see countless variations of the theme. From early TV dismissed as “a fad”, desktop printing wiping out printing businesses, Uber, even personal computers (wasn’t it the boss of IBM who predicted that only six computers would be needed worldwide?).
I myself have made such predictions: I reckoned it would be too expensive to wire up cable TV in Australia and we would have universal satellite services. Oops.
Then I reckoned self-drive cars would be slow being implemented because the metallic tracks would have to be embedded in the roads.
I never suspected self-drive cars could have computers so smart that they could “see” the road just like we do. Who knew?
When Microsoft launched Windows 95 (we did video support for the roadshow), Bill Gates announced the MS network and predicted 20 million users by the turn of the century.
I did the math; 20 million in 5 years? 4 million a year, or around 11,000 a day. HOW, I asked, could Microsoft process that many, how many phone people were they hiring? Of course, as it happened, there were no phone peeps – rather than ring up, Users went online and completed their own subscriptions. D’oh!
So now “how will we see billboards?” Dude! The answer is we’ll see them in a way we least expect.
So, in my new driverless car, with the front seats reversed, will I be watching a big screen in the middle connected to my phone or will my phone be completely embedded into the car system? I COULD look out the front of the car – and I probably will for a while. But I don’t have to look out the front of aeroplanes anymore. I can get on with a range of activity.
No doubt driverless cars will produce the same behaviour.
(Maybe I’ll lie down and look at a screen in the roof)
So, forget billboards, they’re gone. Think instead how can advertising be integrated into my driving experience. Location dependant information will be GPS based and integrated into my system. If there is a food outlet 5k away, I don’t need a billboard with a drawing of coffee on it, it will come up automatically somewhere in my sight. Hologram?
It might also prove better where, for instance, a car can report it has travelled a certain distance or time – thus the occupants are more likely to be hungary. Less “hits” for the advertiser but tighter targeting and higher value. Family of five in the car? Time to highlight that ‘family special’.
A series of conditions can be programmed: “travel over 50k, three or more occupants, destination sixty minutes or more away” and a suitable message used. A bank of messages can be available.
This might also be a sort of disruptive technology: imagine I could program preferences into my car system, maybe I like small places where they serve coffee and sandwiches. These places could come up on my screen rather than bigger brands.
A bit like “avoid tollways” on my SatNav today.
We’ve all had the experience of seeing a “Macca’s 5k” sign on a trip and, as we pull out of Maccas, we notice the cute little coffee shop we would have preferred if we had known.
Could happen. Nah! Nobody really wants to hear actors talk.
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Great comment, John.
I agree with your thoughts on location-based messaging specific to the nature of the passengers, their preferences and particular types of trips.
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Thanks for your comment, Heather.
In good news, I think passengers may be able to pay a small surcharge in order to limit the ads to which they’re exposed on their trips in self-driving cars.
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