How Ad Agencies Must Transform In An IoT World

This article is by Mike Proulx, executive VP, director of Digital Strategy & Tech Innovation at Hill Holliday.
In the classic 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, The Scarecrow sings his wish to become smart—if he only had a brain. He, of course, gets his wish as The Wizard prophetically exclaims that anybody can have a brain because, after all, a brain is just a mediocre commodity.
Seventy-six years later, the commoditization of smarts means that any thing can have a brain, too. Yes, I’m referring to the much-hyped Internet of Things (IoT)—where if it can be internet connected, it will be Internet connected. And just as The (smart) Scarecrow ended up ruling the Land of Oz, smart “things” are poised to rule our world, with Gartner estimating a proliferation of more than 20 billion of them by 2020.
Simply put, IoT is a rapidly growing ecosystem of devices that sense conditions and transmit data. Each device gets its “brain” from algorithms that trigger appropriate responses based on the data it’s receiving. The power of IoT lies in the fact that these devices (because they’re all internet connected) can easily interact with one another through standard protocols.