• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, September 12, 2016

The sensors of the Internet of Things will help marketers determine where people are so they can determine the best time and location for any appropriate messaging.

Beacons, which have been being installed in retail stores in earnest during the last year or so, can help brands determine when shoppers are near their products. They then can either interact with those shoppers or decide to passively capture traffic activity and patterns around them.

Before a consumer gets to the store, there also are opportunities to interact via various location technologies, such as Wi-Fi and geofences.

And then there’s connected lighting.

Continuing its push into IoT activities, Verizon just agreed to purchase Sensity Systems, a California company that specializes in connected LED lighting found as a component of smart city installations.

From a market standpoint, the lighting could be a significant tracking device for retail.

Sensity Systems products are promoted as having the ability to track:

• Conversion – Of people walking by, how many went into the store
• Bounce – The number of those who went into a store and came out quickly
• Return rate – The number of people who return to a store
• Dwell time – The length of time people spend in a store

Some of these tracking capabilities have been available through other technologies but not via lighting.

The smart lights are sensor-equipped, solid state smart devices, each with its own unique IP address.

Philips Lighting recently added connected lights to a major retailer in France. When a shopper opens a phone, the light hitting the phone can identify the location of the person to within inches.

Verizon already had a collection of connected-intelligent things that involve parking lighting, traffic management and security, all generally aimed at aiding making cities smart.

Adding the LED lighting technology of Sensity to Verizon’s portfolio may provide a boost for smart cities.

But location data may be the crown jewel here.

Depending on if and how much (or in what way) Verizon will make any of that consumer location data available to marketers could add another critical link in the IoT consumer value chain.