The Advertising of Things
You’ve probably spent a little time thinking about what it will mean to have an “internet of things”. Maybe within your industry you’ve even mapped it out, but outside of one’s own domain the follow-on consequences are difficult to conceive beyond the first generation or two. Like…
Nest’s smart thermostats claim to know when to turn up the heat based on my behavior, that’s handy; but since my phone will know the weather and how close we are to home it will turn up the furnace for me, even cooler; but maybe since my fridge knows what I’m running out of, it can tell FreshDirect and I don’t have to leave the house in the first place. Or…
Need a pill? Prescription medicine bottles are going to get smart caps that keep track of when you take your meds; but don’t bother with that because other sensors are going to be lodged in your stomach to tell your doctor whether you actually swallowed the pill; and if we go that far, can FDA approval of devices in your body that actually dispense the medication be far behind?
None of these are new ideas. You can see from the links that a lot of work has already been done. Yet when people are painting the colors of this bright future, the idea that’s rarely featured is the one we should all have seen coming. Leave it to the visionaries at Google to tell us where the dollar signs are to be found: advertising, in every nook and cranny of life. That clever thermostat will shortly be one of many new platforms for a commercial message. As a consumer already dismayed by ever more intrusions into my daily life, yes, I’m a little alarmed by this; but every opportunity in the marketplace has an equal and opposite business model (if that hasn’t already been succinctly stated, you can call that O’Reilly’s Law). Every creator of waste spawns junk dealers and garbage men; fatty foods increase the sales of diet books. AdBlock has a business model too. So let’s assume someone will find a way to turn it all off when we want to and instead consider the possibilities.
That smart fridge could alert me to specials available in local grocery stores, knowing exactly what I need and the best price for it in the neighborhood. When I leave the house and set the alarm, might a message on the display offer monitoring services? Once at the store, I might really want that intelligent shopping application at the checkout that warns me if I’m buying a something that might trigger my shellfish allergy; but it’s going to pay for itself by suggesting products, not by warning me away from them. Back home, my FitBit could have a better idea than I do about how worn my running shoes are. Why wouldn’t it tell me when I need to buy new ones?
Your next car is going to be intelligent and internet-connected, all the better to get software updates (Tesla recently avoided a physical recall this way). At the same time we’re already seeing insurers give rate credits to drivers who permit a device to monitor their driving patterns. The new car won’t need a special device, the smarts will already have been built in by the manufacturer. But since it’s independent of the carrier, you’re going to need to tell your car where you hold your policy. And then it’s only one more little step to let carriers reach out to you through the car’s dashboard. If they’re willing to offer better rates based on your driving patterns, and you shop on the rate as most drivers do, you’d want them to.
Sure advertising can be annoying. But each of these applications at least has potential to be in the consumer’s interest. Unlike a billboard or TV ad, they’ll know something relevant about their recipient. That means that they’ll be able to offer something that appeals to that individual. The scattergun approach is no longer efficient. And finally, by providing the manufacturer of the device with additional revenue streams, it should actually reduce the purchase price. Maybe the consumers are going to adjust to this brave new connected world more easily than I thought.
