Digital Marketing in an IoT World

In reading a recent article about the Internet of Things (IoT) as explained by technology pioneer Tim O’Reilly, the one thing that jumped out was a mention of Google Now as a all-knowing, context-aware, predictor app.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/tim-oreilly-explains-the-internet-of-things/

O’ Reilly’s point is that we’re in the early stage of IoT adoption; that once more and more everyday things have sensors and wireless communication we will see transformative experiences in our daily lives. Uber, he says, is an early IoT company where both the driver and the passenger are now enabled to communicate in a real-time, context-aware manner (context in this case being location). The article’s meta point (for me anyway) is that once the ‘things’ from the Internet of Things are wired (or more accurately wirelessly wired), there will be a tremendous amount of data that gets fed back to the humans so that they can make a decision. Or to O’Reilly’s point some data cruncher that manages the entire operation thereby providing context and personalization to the human (or customer). Fascinating stuff. But the mention of Google Now towards the end of the article caught my eye. Once Google Now gets more and more inputs from IoT-enabled devices it has the potential to be a very clever predictor app that can deliver context-aware suggestions to its user. Viewing this from the lens of digital marketing one can see how Google Now could serve ads in this paradigm or perhaps more powerfully extract fees from merchants and brands to surface their wares meaningfully within these powerful context-aware suggestions. The next big monetization wave? Or something incremental or natural given current digital marketing trends? As long as it provides value to the consumer, I predict strong user adoption.