The Metrics Society: The IoT and its Role in Marketing Automation

Gartner predicts 26 billion devices will be connected to the IoT by 2020. ABI predicts 30 billion devices will be connected wirelessly. The 2015 UK budget puts aside £40,000,000 for research into the Internet of Things. The completed scenario calls for people, animals, and products to be tagged with a unique IP address. New versions of IP are under development to answer to the Big Data issues involved with the IoT. The Internet of Things is no more an endgame then the internet itself, but it is a foreseeable future. It may lead to the interconnection of every card-carrying human on the planet. It may lead to civilization and everything it produces locking into a quantifiable, accessible network and perhaps, an over reliance on a complex automation. The IoT will lend to breaches in security and compromised personal privacy. It is science fiction becoming a reality. The only sure bet is that it will be extremely beneficial to marketing practices and the generation of quality leads through the use of socio-environmental analytics. The primary benefit will be the perfection of marketing automation. An example: Watchmaster is a hypothetical company that manufactures middle to high-shelf wrist watches. The product is integrated with smart technology, powered by a low-functioning OS. It displays the weather, time, and other personalized information. It is a fitness tracker and a heart rate monitor. But most importantly, it is connected to the internet. The information recorded by the watch is stored online. The records are then viewed by the watch-wearer through an application that presents the results as easy-to-read schematics, it logs times into a calendar, it recommends new routines, and so on and so forth. But what other information could it be sending and to whom? The most practical application is automated troubleshooting solutions. The watch malfunctions and the error is automatically reported to the manufacturer’s server. The error is then processed and measured against other errors sent from other watches. That specific class of error is then reported, filed, and quantified so that the problem can be easily analyzed by the programmers who would then mend the program and remotely fix the broken watch. The patch would be in place and any future errors of that class would be automatically mended. An apology message would be sent to the watch wearer. Feedback would be instantaneous. Excellent. But it doesn’t end there. Because of the nature of smart technology and its close proximity to the user, the list of quantifiable observations is endless. Therefore, the marketing response is limitless. The watch isn’t working and the watch wearer has realized this. The wearer is responding. Where is the wearer? Where does the wearer go? What is the wearer’s heart rate? Is the watch removed? How often does the wearer check the watch to see if it’s working again? Then, once the problem is fixed, all of same questions can be asked and the answers can be compared and analyzed. Eventually, the analytic model will be completely automated: •Information is collected from tangibles •Statistical analytics •Energy usage and practical usage •Marketing analytics •Feedback This cycle would repeat for every unit sold. Every car, head of cattle, light bulb, and door knob. Perhaps, every child born. A complete picture is formed. The results are filtered and repetitive task are fully automated to drastically reduce the chances of human error. Will it become a dystopian nightmare or a marketers dream? Or does one hand lead the other?