The latest M&C Saatchi's Inspire event invited former CEO of Tinker London and inventor of the Goodnight Lamp, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (you can follow her on twitter @iotwatch) to talk about how advertisers can make the most of the 'Internet of Things'.
For the uninitiated, the Internet of Things is a catch-all term for the growing number of physical objects that are connected to and interacting with the internet: from lamps to vending machines to Tower Bridge. In their 2010 introductory video to the idea (which is well worth a watch) IBM suggested that already there may be more objects on the internet than people. Two years on, this is almost certainly the case.
What does this mean for advertisers? Well, it’s rife with creative opportunity to redesign how customers interact with brands and their products. Stand-out examples included Renault’s RFID enables exhibition stand that allowed visitors to ‘like’ the physical car they were admiring in the real world on Facebook. Also, a Coca-Cola vending machine that would alter the cost of a drink depending on the temperature registered outside. What’s more, all these are made possible by super simple technologies like RFID (the same as what is in every Oyster card) and Arduino. A word of caution however, as with everything we do, the best and most hard working ideas are always those that are right for the brand and solve its problems.
The full deck that Alexandra presented, along with many more examples of the internet of things, can be found on her website - http://designswarm.com/