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Sensors are fast becoming the eyes and ears of marketers

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It’s not just engineers who are designing sensor-based systems for the Internet of Things. According to Adweek magazine, global brand marketers, publishers, and media companies love the fact that sensors used in wearables, clothing, virtual reality, beacons, and smartphones can all collect and transmit useful marketing data.

“Advertising has always sought to change or build someone’s emotional response to a brand,” said Ben Samuel, marketing technology director for PHD, a media, and communications agency. A few years ago media technology was not something high on marketing director’s agendas. In today’s programmatic and data-driven world, with near-constant evolution in the way digital is bought, it’s an ever more important consideration.

“With the data that sensors can produce, there’s a real possibility that emotional response can be reliably inferred or even targetable in the future by using combinations of heart rate, temperature and skin changes,” Samuel observed.

Marketers see sensors as “the eyes and ears of computers.” It’s a valuable position that explains why the advertising and marketing community will be out in force at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where all things in electronic sensors and the Internet of Things will be on wide display.

Marketing and branding experts agree that sensor-based marketing efforts will be a major focus in 2016. In fact, sensors have already played a role in how marketers are producing live events. According to Adweek’s report, one agency used sensors for Jaguar in which it got 20 consumers to wear biometric cuffs, which measure heart rate, motion and audio levels, during last fall’s Wimbledon tennis championship. By gaining insight into the “stimulation and emotion,” the agency reportedly was able to gauge “crowd reaction,” and then push out posts through social media for Jaguar’s #FeelWimbledon campaign that reportedly upped consumer engagement on social media channels nearly 12 percent.”

Some of the emerging application areas for sensor use, and comments about their rationale in marketing:

  • Clothing: The structure of textiles is the same as the structure of touch screens used in everyday mobile devices and tablets. If you just replace some of the threads in the textiles with conductive threads, you should be able to weave a textile that can recognize a variety of simple touch gestures, like any touch panel you have on a mobile phone.
  • Beacons, or location-based sensor technology: These sensors allow marketers to pinpoint where consumers are and to send push notifications of sales and recommendations to their smartphones.
  • Apple Watch: Marketers expect to create experiences designed solely for the watch’s capabilities.
  • Virtual Reality: Publishers have signed on, including The New York Times, to send readers on VR tours of New York and war-torn regions. By tracking head movements, sensors enable the immersive VR experience.