The co-founder and executive director of MIT’s Auto-ID lab, Kevin Ashton, coined a term in the mid-1990s — the Internet of Things — that has increasingly attracted the attention of marketers. He proposed to apply the logic of the web to objects in the physical world: to connect everything that exists physically to the Internet through the application of ubiquitous tags and sensors. Like individual web pages, everything down to a single product on a grocery store shelf would have a unique digital identity — and, in effect, its own URL. Addressable as a web page, every object would naturally become an element of the media landscape, capable of interacting directly with end-users to deliver commercial messaging — including advertising.