IoT and its Uses

What is IoT?

IoT (Internet of Things) implies the billions of physical devices across the world that are now connected to the internet and/or among themselves, each of them gathering and sharing data. Examples of such devices include Amazon virtual assistants like Alexa, Google Nest, even our own smartphones. Quintillion bytes of data are daily transmitted from IoT devices. These data when used in efficient ways will greatly improve advertising.

Improved Advertising:

Current advertising methods suffer from excess or poor targeting. IoT promises different and personalized advertising rather than one-size-fits-all strategies.

IoT functions in a similar and deeper way to current technology, analytics, and big data. Existing technology collects specific data to produce related metrics and patterns over time, however, that data often lacks depth and accuracy. IoT improves this by observing the behavior of the consumer and analyzing them differently.

Where IoT and advertising meets?

IoT has already made its way into a lot of industries including advertising. IoT provides extremely large amounts of data about a person’s general behavior patterns, buying habits, preferences, culture, and other characteristics. These data help the companies to personalize the advertisements that are shown to the customers based on the data received from them.

Contextual Targeting

This type of advertising shows advertisements based on the current requirements of the consumer. For example, if the consumer is searching for a nice pair of shoes, when a shoe ad is shown, the probability of the consumer buying the product is very high. This type of advertising has high rate of converting viewers into customers.

In-store Advertising

In this method of advertising, ads are shown based on the products the customers were checking inside the store. This is made possible with the use of beacons setup by the store. Beacons are nothing but tiny transmitters which are capable of transmitting low energy Bluetooth signals to nearby devices. This will help to show ads of products related to the products which the customer just added to their shopping cart.

Location-based Advertising

IoT devices are capable of tracking the location of the people or items using the GPS integrated to their systems. This will help in advertising products near the location of the consumer. When the user is looking for a restaurant, IoT can suggest a restaurant close to the location of the user and can also show the route to the restaurant using GPS. This will greatly reduce the work of the consumer and increases the chance of the customer using the service.

Intention-based Advertising

This method helps to advertise products according to the intention of the consumers. If a customer buys spare parts for their garage, instead of suggesting the main selling product of the shop, the ads will show spare parts since the customers intention is to buy them and hence increasing sales.

Conclusion:

The concept of IoT advertising is still developing. This is just the beginning of a bigger picture. It’s well established that IoT will make advertising more intrusive and will make people feel uneasy of their data being used without their knowledge. However, this will adversely change the way in which brands advertise their products.