Who's NOT talking about the Internet of Things?
Who's NOT wondered how to get a piece of the sqillions of bucks that IoT will - and we know that one way or another it's true - generate.
And yet, as with so many techno-cultural shifts (this one's truly tectonic), few of us have a sense of, beyond the undoubtedly enormous IT and telco RFP's that are already starting to fly about, where the value will lie for a) businesses and b) their customers.
This is THE hot spot for IoT. We have to get beyond the bewildered - albeit polite - shrug of the CMO, and the unconvinced shrug of the connected consumer.
We have to know how making dumb objects smart will create fresh, sustainable customer value, and, in the end far more critically, how it will build brands.
I have to say that I wrote about this in great depth (and disccomfort: this was 14 years ago now) with my then-collaborator and long-time friend David Stoughton, in our still-robust manifesto for digital value, Promiscuous Customers: Invisible Brands; we called it "information-based service value" in the book.
The information's now a given of course. But the hunt is now on the elusive value that configure-once, love-forever customer services will enable and sustain.
Some of us are (once again) thinking about this challenge in great detail. I'll be writing about it in the coming months.
A good - and far too long overdue - reboot to this old blog of mine. Labouring in the mines of agencyland had, as so often happened, dulled the edge of the remains of the brain.
No longer. Let's crack the IoT. It's where digital value REALLY takes off. And this is not, believe me, your mother's marketing.