Cannes may be their Mecca, but for marketing and advertising executives a pilgrimage to Las Vegas to catch the annual Consumer Electronics Show has now become unavoidable. According to one estimate, CES 2015 had 26,000 marketing and advertising executives in attendance. By all accounts there were more CMOs and advertising folk at the 2016 edition that just ended.

And why not? As consumers hang out more and more with their devices, and the era of Internet of Things dawns, it’s become imperative for marketers to understand the world of gadgets and gizmos and how people engage with them. And not just the marketers of smart cars or smartphones but from every field — from food to apparel to shoes. You never know, the way things are going, a chip on the cheese you are eating might start telling you where it is sourced from. Tech is the door to the consumer of tomorrow.

As writer Josh Weinberger in one perceptive tweet on CES said, “Internet of Things = Internet of Customers.”

Watch out for these three From the tweets and noise emanating from CES 2016, the three big implications for marketers were:

Start thinking IoT strategy: It had to happen. The selfie fridge made an appearance. The Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator with sensors, cameras and all kinds of buttons that could be controlled remotely through a smartphone literally set off the antennae of marketers at the meet. CMOs were already thinking how they could serve up ads and offers for grocery products as the consumer’s phone talked to the fridge.

CES2016 was so much about smart appliances, smart self-driving cars, smart über luxurious watches and even smart toothbrushes that the betting is, IoT will surely take off in 2016 — even perhaps in India. Last October at an IOTIndia event in Gurgaon organised by BGR, marketers from Volvo, doctors from Medanta, and fitness band makers such as Goqii’s Vishal Gondal had shared how connected devices were already making an impact on healthcare and auto, though infrastructure still lagged and prevented wholesale application and adoption.

“IoT is both an opportunity and a challenge for marketers,” says Rajkumar Venkatesan, Professor of Business Administration, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, an expert on analytics and mobile shopper marketing. The opportunity, he says, is that consumption data — how people are using a product — which was not available earlier opens up and will lead to new product innovations. The challenge is consumer adoption of IoT-enabled products, as their pricing may be a deterrent.

Time to redistribute advertising: LG might have grabbed some eyeballs with its fully flexible roll-up full HD television screen at CES 2016, but it was service provider Netflix’s announcement that it was rolling out in 130 countries, including India, that was the big news of the show. “You are witnessing the birth of a new global Internet TV network,” said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, at Las Vegas. Indeed, with video on-demand services here, cable and satellite channels will need to fight even harder to protect advertising revenues.

As for marketers, the good news is, with online viewing, they can expect to reach and engage with audiences in a more targeted and precise way.

Get going in the data game: The data deluge is going to get even more overpowering. What CES 2016 showed was that literally anything you touch in the homes, hotels, shops and offices of tomorrow will have sensors and beacons transmitting behavioural information. Smart marketers are already asking questions such as, who owns all this data? The devices firms or the messaging apps? Or the telecom company? If a Facebook, which already has access to huge swathes of user data, is investing in consumer hardware through virtual reality headsets such as Oculus Rift, clearly, owning both device as well as messaging app is going to be important.

To capitalise on or monetise the data, brands need to be at all places. Meanwhile, for digital marketers, it’s important to move out of walled gardens and open up their APIs (application programming interfaces) and allow sharing and building on each other’s platforms. A little bit of technology can go a long way in customer acquisition and engagement.

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