• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 7, 2015

In so many ways, the store shelves are about to become extensions of the media environment. Of course, endcaps, shelf tags and even QR codes have long ago activated the retail environment as an active part of the marketing endeavor. More recently, the emergence of beaconing, in-store mapping, and geo-fencing have turned an environment once owned and fully controlled by the retailer into hotly contested airspace where store owners, mall managers, product manufacturers and countless mobile startups are vying for user attention at the moment of decision.  

As cheap, ubiquitous sensors expand connectivity from larges spaces to individual products, that contested terrain becomes all the more complicated and in some ways more promising. In the first few years of in-store connectivity the focus was on profiling spaces, driving people into stores, getting a deeper level of understanding about how advertising is impacting sales, etc.

But as sensors migrate to individual products, and as the Internet of Things technologies connects items on store shelves, we will get insight into how consumers are interacting with products -- and make it easier for them to do so. Interim technologies like QR codes have allowed some level of digital interaction between buyer and thing at the shelf level for years. But these have always been inconvenient, rather dumb, technologies that relatively few consumers bothered using. As things like printed tags become more commonplace on products, we move toward a world where people will be able to tap a product with their phones to render seamlessly information about it. And of course this interaction will be delivering to manufacturers data about  who is showing interest in an item, and perhaps what marketing exposures may have led them there.

It is this knitting together of of advertising data and in-store behaviors, not just sales, that constitutes that next layer of knowledge an Internet of Things might make visible to marketers. And so the recent deal between IoT platform company Evrythng and first party ad data platform TruEffect caught my eye.

Evrythng has helped companies like Mondelez and Diageo test Web-connected products in store and manage the data these items render. It is also a platform that will help manage the data generated by a new generation of connected home appliances like thermostats, refrigerators and washing machines. TruEffect specializes in letting large performance advertisers leverage their own first-party data and combine it with third-party data for ad targeting. In this partnership, advertisers using connected products will be able to add that aisle-level data with their TruEffect data to then target and message consumers who handled or bought the item.

Being able to connect a specific bottle of booze or packaged good to a user had vast implications for both advertising and CRM. Diageo, which launched its connected bottles in a test earlier this year, will be able to tell when one of its Johnnie Walker “Smart Bottles” has been purchased and brought home, and even when it is opened. This enable the manufacturer to send messaging, recipes and further deals that align with the exact state of the product’s use. In other words, the technology could let the bottle converse with the consumer throughout its lifecycle. Connect that data to an ad platform and that consumer intelligence can inform subsequent ad targeting to this and other consumers.

As Evrythng, CEO Niall Murphy said in a statement about the deal, smart products constitute  “a powerful new owned media platform for brands.” In essence, by being connected, manufacturers’ products become a media channel of their own -- a way to communicate interactively and generate consumer intelligence from the consumable object itself.

The ways in which the Internet of Things opens up new pathways to consumers will be the main topic at MediaPost’s first IoT: Shopping event, in New York on Aug. 6. From reinventing the shopping experience at the aisle level to beacons, mobile payments to VR, we are exploring how the hyperconnectivity of places, people and now things at retail will impact the entire marketing economy.  

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