Chan Lieu of the Washington DC Law Firm Venable talked about self-driving cars on yesterday’s OAAA webinar. The webinars are a valuable perk of OAAA membership and a good reason to join OAAA.

Here are the highlights.

Deployment of autonomous cars will take 20 years if you look at technology adoption curves.  Automobiles and color TV sets took about 18 years to reach more than half of the market after each technology was introduced.

Insider sees five implications of autonomous cars for the out of home industry:

• Auto dealer advertising could fade if vehicle ownership shifts to fleets and ridership shifts to autonomous vehicle ride-sharing services in more urban areas.

• As a related point, auto insurance advertising may go away if insurance is provided by ride-sharing services. Think about a world without GEICO out of home ads.

• Ride-sharing services, which operate autonomous vehicle fleets, may buy more advertising to promote their services.

• There will be more competition for attention. People in an autonomous car can check email, read, view interior screens, and sleep.  Some autonomous concept cars don’t even have windows, although Insider can’t imagine wanting to get inside any car without windows.

• Even in the long-term future, there will be cars driven by people, and naturally impacts to rural America will be different than urban areas.

Lieu said the challenge for the outdoor industry is to find other services that can be provided to communicate with the car, e.g. wifi, ads targeted to consumers in cars.  Ask yourself how your out of home assets can be part of this new system.  Cars need to know exactly where they are.  GPS isn’t good enough for most autonomous cars.  There may be the opportunity to use beacons on out of home assets which help autonomous cars to operate.

OAAA members can listen to the entire webinar at this link.

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