Jess Greenwood, Director, Contagious Insider
The Internet of Things
The last two decades of communication have been dominated by screens of varying sizes. However – despite the acres of column inches dedicated to apps, networks and video in all of their forms – an intriguing new trend sees the most compelling bits of the internet spilling off the screen and into a real world near you.
The ‘internet of things’, or ‘post-digital thinking’ is the term given to the way in which smart digital processes are connected to, or built into, actual objects in order to give them an innate degree of utility, and personalization. Do not let the buzzwords put you off. For those who doubt that this is a genuine trend, we’ve rounded up some examples to show you exactly how quickly this is progressing.
NB. This is not the sole preserve of obscure tech-startups. Unusually, some of the most successful architects of this post-digital world are brands.
The Newspaper Club initiative is a neat example of the internet of things – a service by which you supply text, and images, and they print you off anything from 5 to 5000 copies of your very own newspaper.
StickyBits was the biggest story of this year’s SXSW interactive festival – an app which allows users to tag bits of video, or images or messages, to the barcodes displayed on physical objects – like a Coke can, or a jar of Marmite. Not only is that message then streamed to the leaver’s social networking profile, it’s also immediately visible to other people using the app and leaving their own content. This means that every item on the shelf is a potential media channel for content, user-generated or otherwise.
One of Contagious’ most beloved examples of the wired world around us comes from Guinness, who worked with Red Urban in London to place RFID chips in rugby balls and sensors around rugby pitches, helping coaches to monitor a startling number of statistics such as accuracy of passes and strength of tackles. For the first time, rugby fans can access information about player performance in a game previously woefully under-served by the technological advancements evident elsewhere, courtesy of Guinness. The final piece of the sweaty, muddy jigsaw comes in the form of Guinness’ positioning in Ireland: ‘Alive Inside’. Rugby, too, is now ‘Alive Inside’. How’s that for a smart sports activation?
Also tinkering with the art of the physical is Nike, whose connected shoe paved the way for the world’s largest running community, Nike+. More recently, they created the Nike Chalkbot from Wieden + Kennedy, Portland for LIVESTRONG, Lance Armstrong's cancer charity. At the Tour de France each year, cycling enthusiasts chalk messages of support on the side of the course to encourage and communicate with the competitors. Armed with this insight, Nike set about acting as a conduit to a broader audience. In conjunction with software and design studio DeepLocal, Pittsburgh and robotics developer Standard Robot, they developed a robotic chalking mechanism that receives, processes, prints, captures and delivers data (text, GPS coordinates and photographs).
The Chalkbot received messages from anyone, anywhere in the world via Twitter to @Chalkbot, via an SMS shortcode, or from an entry form on wearyellow.com and printed them along the roads of the Tour de France in bright, LIVESTRONG yellow using 48 nozzles and vats of emulsified chalk. All messages were also photographed by the Chalkbot, and the GPS coordinates captured. This information was then returned to the message sender via email. During the course of the Tour, the Chalkbot sprayed over 100,000 messages of hope in vibrant LIVESTRONG yellow, and one gigantic Contagious logo. Hey – if you don’t ask…
The final word on this subject must be left to David Evans, chief technical officer of DeepLocal and engineer of the Chalkbot, in his summary of why there’s much to be gained in thinking further than the internet, and on to the internet of things.
'The way that people treat things changes a lot once it's physical,’ he suggests. ‘It's not just a throwaway text, or a “Yo...I'm sorry”. Now it's somewhere, right? Now it's some THING.'
Contagious is a magazine and consultancy dedicated to rounding up the most innovative news, campaigns, trends and technologies for the advertising industry.
By Jess Greenwood / Director, Contagious INSIDER
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