Good point. What are people going to do when they’re sitting in their autonomous vehicles? Probably a great time to display an ad for the week’s best selling AR game.
Wow. We are really moving into a sad future where we will be watched and advertised to all the time. I guess self driving cars will also have an ad screen you probably can turn off for a premium.
All we need is a YC-backed AR startup that removes ads from your personal visual space. Although it might be difficult to get that tech safe enough to be used while driving.
Just wait (a few years, perhaps) until you buy or rent that sweet new self-driving car and try to get out of town for some rest and relaxation... you turned off the radio, but that doesn't matter, because Big G uses the windshield as a billboard looming into your personal space, beaming ads to the most captive audience that exists.
I love this effort! I try my best to avoid any type of advertising. I’ll buy an AR/VR headset/glasses when they can block IRL billboard ads. That’s the killer app for me.
I think this will be a whole new issue when AR becomes standard. In fact, it's the whole reason I don't want AR. I just see ads for days coming out of it. Everyone putting little ad starting QR codes (or whatever they settle on) everywhere so every time I turn my head there's a gecko on a coffee table in the random store I'm in trying to sell my car insurance.
Well hopefully we can figure out ways to integrate advertising so deeply into every aspect of our lives that you can no longer escape marketing with pi holes and hammers. Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business. Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it! Imagine glasses that show augmented-reality ads based on your current location and what you are looking at, that would be incredible. Any place people rest their eyeballs should contain ads. Digital picture frames that show family photos in your home should occasionally flash ads, etc. Hopefully the National Park Service can install some satellite base stations so that hikers and campers can get the urgent advertising they need to be aware of the latest survival gear while out in nature. Basically, we need to prevent people from having quiet time and thinking - we need to come with as many ways as possible to aggressively interrupt and intrude thoughts with gentle reminders that the economy needs stimulating and that the only way to truly be happy is with more stuff.
> Do you close your eyes walking around town any time you go by a store front, you see a roadside ad, a bench covered in ads, a taxi backseat, public toilets, any sports events and jerseys, TV, newspapers, magazines, radio...
There will be open-source AR projects to block those, too, one day
"Over the next for years you're going to see a massive drop in the effectiveness and reach of ads in real life"
The good news is that most forms of traditional ads are only mildly calibrated to what purpose they are supposed to achieve. With the exception of coupons (highly trackable) an ad on a billboard for a new type of liquor isn't going to be noticed in non-effectiveness immediately. It will be a slow death.
"that will survive a while are billboards and even they will only last until we have self-driving cars"
Otoh, ordinary car occupants, if not engaged in conversations are more likely to be on a mobile device and not looking out the window. And maybe conversing with the driver about what they read on the mobile device instead of sitting there looking out the window looking at the billboards. Same with billboards viewed from trains (riders on devices certainly more than would be reading books or magazines..)
The article is a (correct) premonition. Advertising companies have already more than half of our day with smartphones and TV, when we will use smart glasses and self drive cars the circle will be closed.
Beaming ads onto mobile or mobile-like devices is an inevitable trend we're going to see over the next decade. For example, most TV watchers actually attend to their phone over the TV. How long will it be before Galaxy phones start beaming Samsung TV ads to your device? And Apple TVs? If they (TV manufacturers) all align on this, there's no real escape.
Cars are just a canary, I think. And a dangerous one at that thanks to driver distraction. But longer term, as we get better autonomous driving systems, expect the interior of "your" vehicle to get plastered with advertisement. Welcome to the future!
Cool batch, particularly LemonBox which provides personalized vitamin packs to buyers in China. There's a huge user base right there, and I imagine the U.S. market is largely saturated / competitive already.
I must respectfully express my concern over: "Grabb-it Inc. turns rideshare cars into digital billboards." There's probably a market for it as online advertisers face an uncertain future with possible regulation, and at least scrutiny, of social media companies, but is this really the future we want to build? Where the only goal of some of these companies is to unrelentingly cover every square inch of the world with ads? Surely there are lawsuits waiting to happen when drivers, distracted from these eye-catching ads on all the cars around them, kill people.
I am worried that our public spaces are turning increasingly hostile to our citizens. Won't this trend continue to make the public space more unpalatable?
The liabilities there are too great to be worth it.
Given that it's AR though, I expect existing billboards to be replaced with greenscreens and the windshield will augment your reality to display whatever some algorithm thinks you should see on it.
They did discuss the case of an alarm becoming more insistent if a pilot didn't notice it. I think it's a small hop from that to "We will only charge you for the ads that people notice in our ad supported VR game" type stuff.
I assume you could also use this for ad targeting if you could get people to watch the right content with their brain reading VR helmets on. "This person focused a bit more on the Cadillac driving through the screen than is typical. Let's show them a Cadillac ad."
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