Your Fridge And Car As An Advertising Tool? Unilever's Head Of Marketing Explains How This Will Be A Reality

Keith Weed is Unilever plc (ADR) UL's Chief Marketing and Communications Officer. During a recent interview with CNBC he shed some light on one of the hottest trends in marketing that will shape the advertising world in 2016 and beyond. Internet Of Things The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the concept of non-traditional devices being connected to the internet. Household products, such as fridges and cars, are now able to communicate with each other. According to Gartner, there will be 6.4 billion connected devices in use in 2016, representing a growth of 30 percent from 2015's level. However, by 2020, there will be 20.8 billion connected devices. In fact, 5.5 million new devices will become connected every day. Weed provided an example in which the connected devices could rely advertising to a user: "Cars drive past supermarkets. Fridges have our products in them. You can soon see that there could be a sort of, a you know, a real shopping list that's going from the fridge into your car and as you are driving by a supermarket it says "Do you know that you know Chunky Monkey is buy one get one free" etc. So you can see very quickly how the internet of things could give real opportunities to marketers to again in a utility way not in a nuisance way but in a utility way to help people simplify their lives."