In the next 10 years all cars manufactured will be able to autonomously drive (limited to no human intervention required). Users will no longer be busy attending to the road and will therefore have the bandwidth to engage with entertainment, do work, and socialize with other passengers. With this change will come a plethora of advertising opportunities.

We expect to see more investment in advertising channels which reach car passengers such as billboards and on-car advertisements. Intelligent glass will be installed into car windows and windshields which will present targeted ads. Depending on the demographics of a particular car’s owner different ads will appear on billboards and other outside advertisements. This allows advertisers to more narrowly target audiences and ultimately increase their marketing ROI.

In the future we expect to see facial recognition at drive-thrus and restaurants. Drive-thru screens and menus will be customized based on each customer’s previous purchasing behaviors, demographics and online behavior. Imagine this: After ordering McDonald’s Big Macs for 4 straight days, you again arrive at their drive-through. At the drive-through a camera scans your face. Instead of displaying the whole menu on the drive-through screen, the screen displays the header “Big Mac Again?” with sides, drinks and food customized based on your age and google search history.

Text suggestions can be annoying the first few days we get a new cellphone. The technology fails to predict accurately how you will finish sentences. However, within a few months the technology gets eerily accurate, learning the patterns of your speech and typing. This intelligence will be used by marketers to create custom messaging on websites, advertisements and emails to make it appear as if each viewer has written the message in their own words.

Mirroring Amazon’s smart locks which allow their delivery workers to lock and unlock customer’s homes using smartphones, there will be a similar capability in the next 5 years with cars. In the age of COVID, and knowing the danger of epidemics to come, contact free services will be of the utmost importance. Restaurant, clothing store and other retailer workers will be able to open and close a customer’s car trunk with their smart phone. This will allow for contact-free curbside pickups.

-Phone cameras scan customers’ faces and apply different types of virtual makeup (think snapchat beauty filters). This allows customers to easily compare one makeup look to another in just a swipe and eliminates the need to go into a store and wipe copious amounts of makeup on and off.

Augmented reality already has many capabilities today and we only expect them to grow. Here are some examples of technologies we expect to expand:

-Potential customers use their smart phone cameras to insert virtual pieces of furniture into their room before purchase. Try out different pieces of furniture with the swipe of your phone.