The potential for digital sensors and big data to make our cities easier to navigate and more efficient, whether it’s for parking, lighting or, in the case of Sensing City, pretty much the whole of Christchurch, is immense. Cisco has been banging on about the possibilities of the internet of things for a few years now, and, as its latest campaign, Building Tomorrow Today, shows, it thinks technology will soon render traffic jams extinct.
By 2020 the number of things connected to the internet is expected to be around 40 billion and less than 20 percent of those will be smartphones, tablets or PCs. The data those things gather aims to make our lives easier or, in the case of a company like Nest, more efficient. And Cisco has shown that the internet of things can also be applied to outdoor advertising.
Retail guru John Wannamaker is credited with the classic ad quote “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. There’s still plenty of mystery in marketing, but there are certainly a host of sophisticated analytics tools that give those forking out for the ads an opportunity to measure their effect. And Adobe and Goodby Silverstein + Partners have launched a brilliant new spot to show how gut feel isn’t the best business strategy.