When Will the Internet of Things Become a Thing? Next Year

The internet of things (IoT) has been a topic of debate among technologists for years, but the term is only just making its way into the mainstream. In fact, a May 2014 survey conducted by Edelman Berland for GE found that 44% of business executives worldwide had never heard of the IoT.

That will change in 2015, according to a new eMarketer report, “Key Digital Trends for 2015: What’s in Store—and Not in Store—for the Coming Year.”

There’s little doubt the world is moving inexorably toward a more connected future, but the speed with which consumers and enterprises make the transition is still very much unclear.

For marketers, the potential of the IoT is twofold:

•     The first opportunity is the sheer mass of new, connected products and services to be sold to both consumers and enterprises.
•     The second lies in the data to be harvested from all the new, connected objects and the ways people interact with them. The opportunity is not about new screens—it’s about the massive insights to be gleaned. The challenge, as with omnichannel marketing, will be to link the data effectively.

Considering that most marketers are already struggling with data overload from the array of touchpoints they currently manage, adding exponentially more objects and more data is no small challenge.

Next year will be a good time to start the process of coming to grips with that challenge.

Courtesy of eMarketer