Rethinking the Internet of Things

I've lost track of the amount of predictions I've read about how the Internet of Things is going to transform the world around us. And there have been some attempts to work out what it all means for the advertising industry.
Forecasts range from the stories about your fridge automatically re-ordering your milk when it's low, to the instalment of automated Baristas in your local coffee shop, to devices that are able to monitor your gestures and thoughts and work out what you want before you even know yourself.

But who's to say? Perhaps some kind of framework to help us think through future scenarios might help - especially given that the the Internet of Things is already here despite most communications companies seemingly not at all prepared for it.

Let's imagine there are three distinct phases for the Internet of Things: the Internet of Things; The Internet of Un-things; and the Internet of Thoughts.

The internet of things

I characterise the Internet of Things as a relationship between devices. This is the phase we are all familiar with, mainly because it is already here and exists in the present day. It's primarily driven by the force of mobility - mobile phones, mobile vehicles and of course, as a result centres around mobile services.
Within this world we are very happy to exchange our personal data for immediate and convenient services that are delivered to us via computerised machines - mobile phones. It is not much of a stretch to imagine a similarly assisted kind of service existing in most of our consumer durables like the TV, dishwasher and fridge, for example.

The beauty of such connectedness to these devices means that the provision of our customer data helps shape the services around our needs. Google Glass and Siri are already two early experiments in this area.

The language of 'machine-to-machine' captures the effects - we can expect that by 2020 if we have 27bn machines that are connected, machines will be communicating more with each other than with us, so it is the inter-relationship between devices that will define this phase.

What will it mean for advertisers? I have always thought that this would be a watershed moment for advertising because it would signal a shift from a world in which our products and services require some agency to communicate with us, to one in which the products and services communicate to us by themselves.
In that scenario, advertising is disintermediated, not only because much of it is wasteful, but because it cannot be as real-time, and as directly addressable, as any message from the product itself.

Let's imagine this is the case, then advertising agencies will in all likelihood focus on the job of getting that product or brand into the hands, or the home, of the consumer in the first place and brand image advertising aimed at driving brand preference once again becomes their raison d'etre.
The rest of the industry then becomes predicated on the offer of great UX and how it can be executed. DM and Direct evolves into UX which becomes the new 'below the line' though ironically perhaps the largest share of a client's budget.

The Internet of Un-things

I characterise the Internet of Un-things as a relationship between different data. In the previous Internet of Things world, the physical and the virtual worlds merge and become hybridised, but there are still physical things - it's just that they now have a virtual element to them.

In the next phase, many more things become dematerialised and our products and services start to exist as information that can be more easily shared and distributed than physical things can. No longer is the internet embedded in physical things; it has become the very environment in which we live.
Imagine our retail experience. We walk into our favourite fashion store, we try on some clothes (physically or virtually), we decide we like them so we pop them in our bag and walk out. Later they are charged to our account. No-one can remember what a cash-register is, and 'queuing' seems a rather quaint practice.

All of our preferences, past purchases, dietary requirements and health information, as well our geo-location and all of our activities, are stored as data and are used to inform brands. Every purchase from a holiday to healthy food could become a data-driven decision: we are surrounded by data which is constantly learning about us in our environment.

Doc Searls explains best: "It isn't necessary for everything to have on-board intelligence, or to be connected full-time to the Net. Intelligence and connectivity can be abstracted away from things themselves to their own Clouds."

He envisages a world in which people have their own 'clouds of things' communicating with each other assuming they have the permissions: "Today, all customer-service frameworks are provided by companies, and not by customers. All are also different from each other and require that each of us maintain separate relationships with all of them. (Even when many companies use the same back-end Cloud, as they do with Salesforce, what faces the customer is different for each company.)
"In the new system we see emerging above, customers will own and standardise the relationships they have with companies. (One small example of this is the ability to change one's contact information one time for all company relationships, rather than separately for all of them.)"

Connectedness becomes a mannered system and set of protocols enabling data to relate better with other data without being encumbered by walled gardens, or non-standardised devices or any other barrier to interconnectivity.
What does dealing with this amount of intangible data mean for advertisers? It could mean that brands have to collaborate and co-operate with other 'partners' to enable them to offer bundles of services where data relationships can flow more easily or the services are discounted.

Perhaps security, privacy and reliability become the most communicated attributes in advertising. If people are taking on the brokering of their data with brands themselves, perhaps agencies look to offer their advertising services to actual environmental services rather than brands.

Agencies could become employed by hospitals, shops, and other institutions and organisations to optimise their communication to people over the ether. The brief becomes: what communications do you want to emit to those who come into contact with you in the surrounding environment? Music, temperature, loyalty points could all be part of the answer.

In this phase, the Internet is still external but is meshed within the whole environment rather than embedded into things. However, in the next phase, the internet becomes ingestible, implantable, and even connected to our own minds.

The Internet of Thoughts

I characterise the internet of thoughts as a relationship between mind and body. Embedding technology into human bodies, not just devices, in order to collect and automate communications is not a new idea. But there is a lot of new activity happening in this area right now.
Google CEO Larry Page said (in In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy): "Eventually you'll have an implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer."
And that is a dream scenario: to intuit our intent before we even know what it is ourselves.

According to MIT Technology Review, in the Emerging Technology Lab at Samsung, they are researching ways to allow people to use their thoughts to launch an application, select a contact, select a song from a playlist or power up a phone. Perhaps we'll even be able to purchase goods by a thought not even a gesture, or we can search for information with only the power or our mind.
Machines that can read your desire whilst you stand in front of a poster are already in development. At the University of Washington a pilot study allowed one person's brain signal sent over the internet to control the actions of another person's hand.

More likely these signals will be used for brands to serve our unspoken needs through anticipating what it is that we want so that they can move from 'assist' to 'anticipate'. Moving computers from people's pockets to people's clothes, and then into their minds will have all sorts of unforeseen consequences. But in terms of advertising, perhaps advertising real estate will no longer exist on devices, but in our heads.

If I subscribe to a brand, maybe I am also agreeing to terms and services that allows that brand to implant brand images and messages directly into my mind, embedding them in my thoughts. Maybe that will guarantee that the next time I feel thirsty, only Coca Cola springs to mind.

It sounds like Science Fiction but one day advertisements may well only exist as thoughts rather than physical materials. One things is for sure, this would mean marketing moves beyond its current love of technology and starts to embrace biology and before that, starts to adopt biological metaphors rather than technological ones to describe how communication works and how we evaluate its effects.

Where to now?

The roadmap above suggests that we move through three phases with distinct mindsets and assumptions, although there will be some overlaps. The first stage, the Internet of Things, demonstrates that we are still viewing the world primarily in physical form. And we assume advertising's role is to help create more production - both of things for consumers to consume but also advertising and communications materials themselves.

As we evolve into the Internet of Un-things, the surrounding environment and how we sense it becomes more important as do intangibles like the cloud, situational intelligence, the capturing of moods, actions and mindsets for profiling. Access rather than production is of more value and advertising becomes more about true interactivity as we interface directly with the internet (we are the device), especially given it will become the environment in which we live.

Finally, in the Internet of Thoughts, those interactions become internalised once the mind and the Internet are directly networked, linking intention and action in a more transparent, public and informative way. Rethinking our information systems like the internet in a more biological way will help redefine communications completely. But who is ready for this kind of world?

I don't see any big agency networks buying bio-tech companies or deep learning labs to include in their portfolio, so in all likelihood, no advertising giant that currently exists today.

With the exception of Google, of course.