MOSCOW, RUSSIA OCTOBER 16, 2018: Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Yandex IT company CEO ... [+]
Looking ahead to full, self-driving vehicles the question comes up, what to do with all that idle time while the car does all the work?
Some scenarios include grabbing a nap, watching videos, checking emails, holding business meetings or just being left alone with your thoughts.
They’re all viable ideas, but to anyone involved in selling products or services, an idle rider is a juicy target.
How much idle time? Productsup, a Berlin, Germany-based company that works with retailers to target their online advertising, points to research conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Valvoline.com that has estimated with an average one-way daily commute of 35 minutes, that’s 152 hours a year where a person in a self-driving vehicle would theoretically have nothing to do but look for some way to occupy their time, in most cases by going online, including viewing streaming videos via services like Netflix or YouTube.
Marcel Hollerbach, Chief Marketing Officer at Productsup.
“If you think of it, the Netflix, and the Amazon and the Facebook and the Google will all of a sudden have millions of hours more of time available for consumers all over the world,” said Productsup Chief Marketing Officer Marcel Hollerbach in a phone interview. “This is massive.”
To get in front of consumers while they’re rolling along, Hollerbach says a most effective way would be what’s known as local inventory advertising—a tactic Google and Facebook have pioneered.
The concept is simple. In the case of Google, when a shopper clicks on an online ad, they’ll arrive at a Google-hosted page called the local storefront. The shopper can then check out the store’s hours, inventory and directions.
Example of a local inventory ad on Google.com.
When applied to self-driving vehicles, the possibilities grow, said Hollerbach who predicts, “if you have 10 minutes to spare you can actually click on the link and the.car will automatically navigate you to the store, maybe drive to a drive-through window where the package is ready to pick up.”
The potential to cash in on idle riders in robocars is not limited to retailers, said Hollerbach. There’s money to be made for automakers as well. It will all start with car companies understanding that consumers prefer to use their own devices—smartphones or tablets—to go online rather than via a manufacturer’s system.
“To me what car maker can do is they can provide interfaces between the devices the person brings on board and connect to the navigation,” said Hollerbach. “If I want to navigate to a store I click a button on my iPhone then the iPhone connects to my car and the car will know how to drive to it. It’s convenient for the customer and maybe carmaker can get a little commission for bringing customer to the store.”
He also envisions car companies pushing promotions to customers of ride-sharing services, perhaps subsidizing all or part of the cost of the ride as a reward to the customer for watching the ad.
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When imagining a future when idle riders in robocars are more commonplace, Hollerbach thinks back to an encounter with a friend in college who was an intern at Google when the company first began researching self-driving vehicles. He had asked the friend why Google was bothering to pursue such a path so far outside its core business, that eventually morphed into Waymo, its autonomous vehicle unit.
Hollerbach recalls his friend’s response. “He said, it’s not to get the car to drive itself, it’s about freeing the time of the people who sit in the car.”
Even back then, the tech giant had figured a future robocar rider’s idle time would be as good as money.
