This is an ad that Cisco have produced to flog their routers and other stuff. They used to make a ton of money by positioning themselves as the, ‘Backbone of the Internet’. Now they are more interested in becoming the backbone of the Internet of Things/Internet of Everything.
This means two very important things…
- The IoT is becoming more mainstream and big companies are wanting in.
- Prepare for some really, really, really shocking advertising from corporates with a lot more money than sense.
Of course, this is fairly big news – for people to be talking about the Internet of Things on telly is good and there are some nice images to complement the corporatey music and stuff so it is a nice way to spend one minute and one second of your time taking a look, but Ogilvy could probably have communicated some benefit to humanity to make it make more sense. I do quite like the ad but it doesn;t really communicate anything about value to people.
The message seems to be,
“There is a big thing coming, not far away, and it is going to be big.”
Maybe this is a part of the process of educating the world about stuff so they use more of whatever it is they are talking about but I would have loved to see some of the benefits to humanity that stem from the IoT rather than this sort of, “It’s big, it’s global, it’s coming, did I mention it’s big?” stuff. Surely there was enough money wasted on that sort of spouty nonsense in the last dotcom boom or have a new generation of marketeers taken over that had forgotten about the last time.
“Trees will talk to networks”
WTactualF? Cisco! Ogilvy!
Trees don’t actually talk and even if they could talk and they did talk to networks, why should that matter to people.
Cars don’t actually talk to stoplights or anything else and consumers don’t really care whether cars talk to stoplights, milk cartons or nappies. They care about how long it takes to go from A-B. They care about whether they miss their parent’s evening/ball game/knitting class/whatever because they are stuck in traffic and if the IoT can help them with that, then they will get it.
At least it didn’t mention fridges.
It’s coming people!
And so of course is our rather nice Internet of Things Forum, to be held in Cambridge, 27th June. Everyone who is anyone in IoT will be there.*
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*(Or somewhere else)