On future in advertisements

Technology today has made an ever-increasing inroads into our lives - and with the advent of immersive techniques, made largely thanks to increase of sensors in the common smartphones as well as the apps which utilize them has made advertisements where the target customer can experience the product in more than one dimension.
Coca cola recently launched their coke zero advertisment in the United States during a football game where the users can 'drink' coke during the ad break and redeem coupons that can be used to get a coke zero drink for free by displaying their coupon, which happens to be a QR code.
Such immersive ads are not new (we had samples embedded in newspapers before) but as they require users to perform an action (like hold their phones and imitate the drinking of coke), they move the user interaction to an entirely new dimension.
With the advent of sensors like gyroscope, NFC and technologies like QR, different possibilities to interact with the users in innovative ways has come up which can be a game changer for both the advertisement industry and the e-commerce industry (on the functional and technical side of things respectively).

Recently, I created a mashup for demonstrating a smart chatbot for a client, where the user could enter issue number and fetch the details. By hiding the implementation behind a RESTful api, I was able to use a machine learning chatbot (these are becoming quite prevalent over the internet today) which supports decent nlp-language parsing capabilites as well as machine learning that can be used to train my bot to respond to certain lingo, and then pass on certain keywords to my API, which will provide the required data. Ultimately, the end result for the customer experience is the key to success of any such project and this is precisely what happened in this mashup.

True Omni-Commerce with IoT

The changing face of e-commerce means that successfully buying a product is more than just a few clicks away. Today, with the widespread influx of communicative devices and advertisements, the customer is constantly bombarded with advertisements of interest right from the morning tea to the evening commute, everywhere advertisements try to sell different products. However, this might only affect the user decision, which might be in the favor of competitors of the advertiser. So the context of advertisement with respect to the end customer needs to be revised and the user needs to be engaged -  buy the product rather than just influence decision making. SAP Hybris is currently aiming towards creating the online storefront of the future and is tinkering with some of the things that I am discussing- but a lot needs to be done before things are

Internet Of Things

As defined in Wikipedia, "The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects or "things" embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and connectivity to enable objects to collect and exchange data."
Smart devices/sensors are already increasing exponentially and are poised to make the next big change in everyday life since the rise of internet and by 2020, only the B2B based such devices would be around 5.4 Billion.

Applied IoT

We've all heard about Amazon drones but the ideas do not stop there; by making a user context aware, the e-commerce can jump out of browser to mobile notifications through NFC enabled portals in physical stores. On the other hand, the user based sensors could be used for kiosks and physical display stores, making them intelligent. Another scenario could be the use of RIFD enabled tags on consumables, which can enable gamification based points for repeating customers, leading to repeated orders. These ideas are dime a dozen, but it remains to be seen which technology and business goes all out to adapt them.

True Omni Commerce

Although this sounds good in theory, in real world things like scalability and security take precedence and instead of just improving the context, there is a need to provide actual sales through these additional channels, or in other words, creating a mashup involving existing channels to generate even more avenues. I am currently working as a Hybris developer and am hoping to see some positive influences due to rise of such a technology, which is currently in the playground stage.