Self-Driving Cars And e-Billboarding: Promise And Peril

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

During a normal daily commute in a big city, you might see about 20 to 30 billboards, though you are likely so used to the presence of the billboards that you don’t give any conscious thought toward them.

Interestingly, there are an estimated 350,000 billboards throughout the United States.

That’s a lot of billboards!

Estimates of the amount of money spent on billboards annually in the U.S. vary, but many would guess it is around $8 billion dollars.

In essence, those billboards that you drive past at 65 miles per hour, and for which maybe you notice and maybe you don’t, they are big business involving big bucks.

Advertisers seem to think that billboards are worth paying for.

A particular type of billboard that can be particularly noticeable is an electronic one that is constantly changing from one image to another, and changes throughout the week.

It is easy for the company owning the billboard to showcase new items and avoid the usual…