As the world of places and things becomes increasingly sentient, marketers must be prepared for change. Here are the questions to start asking now.

Characters on packaging sing and dance. Retail inventory "knows" where it is in the store and when it needs to be restocked. Invisible coupons can be snatched from the ether and mobile devices can lead shoppers to items that match pre-selected criteria (low-fat, gluten free, and strawberry flavored). Open the car door, and as the heat and engine automatically start, the seat slides to your preferred position.

The sentient world is not a radical future vision, it's our present reality. Readily available technologies such as smartphones, Google Goggles (and soon, Glass), augmented reality (AR), smart keys and fobs, and even laptops make it increasingly easy to apply layers of content, images, and information on top of objects, products, and places, and to view and experience these additional layers of content. Technology developments will soon enable more and more objects to become sentient, as Corning so elegantly depicted in its highly successful video, "A Day Made of Glass."

Brands, particularly those aspiring to a cutting-edge image, have embraced advertising and marketing in the sentient world. AR almost seems old hat when you start totting up brands that have tried it, including GE, Nestlé, Lego, Kellogg, Mercedes-Benz, and Tesco. Ben & Jerry's augmented ice cream lids. Starbuck's experimented with enhanced coffee cups.

An iPhone app created by Dentsu in Japan allows shoppers to see animated butterflies flitting by. Each butterfly contains a coupon for a nearby business. In-store smart kiosks are becoming popular, as are apps that facilitate shopping. IBM has developed an app that finds what shoppers are looking for by scanning the shelves with a smartphone's video camera.

The sentient world goes far beyond in-store and CPG applications, of course. Destination marketing creates enormous potential both for data and for marketing and advertising applications. Kia, for example, a US Open sponsor, put a layer of information over last year's event.

Unquestionably, as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, as well as cheaper, and as consumer adoption of smart devices soars, the world of places and things will become increasingly sentient. This raises a number of questions marketers must begin addressing now, in order to intelligently introduce content -- literally -- into other dimensions.

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Here's a fun infographic from Fisher Vista, turning content marketing into a board game.

Scrabble, anyone?

Forrester predicts that consumer purchases via smartphones will grow from $10 billion in 2012 to $31 billion in 2016 and smartphones will account for 3% of e-commerce in 2012 and 7% in 2016. With holiday shopping right around the corner, marketers need to have a mobile strategy that enables them to deliver the right impression on the right device.

Todays digital consumer is connected like never before, and with the number of personal devices multiplying at a rapid rate, marketers need to reach their target audience with the right impression.

Here is a fun infographic asking the digital media world "Are you serving the right impression?"

Study: Brands must go digital and join the dots

SUMMARY: Online marketing will help shape 80% of consumers' discretionary spending by 2015, according to a Gartner/ExactTarget study, which suggests brands should focus on developing "hyper-connected" sales and marketing strategies. The brands that move away from single-channel campaigns and find ways to combine tools such as e-mail, social, search and video are expected to experience the biggest payoffs, according to the Marketer's Guide to Multichannel Campaign Management.

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