Advertising in the IoT Era:

Vision and Challenges

Abstract—The Internet of Things (IoT) extends the idea the development of new Internet-based business
of interconnecting computers to a plethora of different devices, models. Among those, online advertising is one of the
collectively referred to as smart devices. These are physical most successful and profitable. Generally speaking,
items – i.e., “things” – such as wearable devices, home online advertising – also referred to as Internet
appliances, and vehicles, enriched with computational and advertising – leverages the Internet to deliver
networking capabilities. Due to the huge set of devices involved
– and therefore, its pervasiveness – IoT is a great platform to
promotional contents to end users. Already in 2011,
leverage for building new applications and services or revenues coming from online advertising in the United
extending existing ones. In this regard, expanding online States alone surpassed those of cable television, and
advertising into the IoT realm is an under-investigated yet nearly exceeded those of broadcast television Plus,
promising research direction, especially considering that worldwide investment in Internet advertising have
traditional Internet advertising market is already worth reached around 200 billion dollars in 2016 [2] and are
hundreds of billions of dollars. expected to get to 335 billion by 2020
In this paper, we first propose the architecture of an IoT
advertising platform inspired by the well-known business Online advertising allows web content creators and
ecosystem, which the traditional Internet advertising is based service providers – broadly referred to as publishers – to
on. Additionally, we discuss the key challenges to implement monetize yet providing their business for free to end
such a platform with a special focus on issues related to users. For example, news websites or search engines can
architecture, advertisement content delivery, security, and operate without charging users as they get paid by
privacy of the users. advertisers who compete for buying dedicated slots on
those web pages to display ads .
The global spread of mobile devices has also been
I. changing
INTRODUCTION
The Web has gained so much importance in the
market economy during the last two decades because of
the original target of online advertising . This is
indeed moving
from showing traditional display advertisements (i.e., advertisement panels based on his habits (e.g.,
banners) on desktop computers to the so-called native preferred stopping locations, hotels, and
advertisements impressed within app streams of restaurants). Furthermore, IoT high connectivity
smartphones and tablets [9]. More generally, Internet and scalability will allow advertising to be
advertising business will eventually extend to emerging performed in a really dynamic environment as new
pervasive and ubiquitous interconnected smart devices, smart devices are constantly joining or leaving the
which are collectively known as the Internet of Things IoT network. Finally, different from the traditional
(IoT). web browser-based advertising where a limited
Enabling computational advertising in the IoT number of user interactions occur during the day,
world is an under-investigated research area; IoT advertising might count on users interacting
nonetheless, it possibly includes many interesting with the IoT environment almost 24 hours a day.
opportunities and challenges. Indeed, IoT The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
advertising would enhance traditional Internet Section II motivates the idea of IoT advertising with
advertising by taking advantage of three key IoT a use case scenario. Section III and IV articulate key
features [8]: device diversity, high connectivity, and background concepts. In Section V, we propose our
scalability. IoT device diversity will enable more vision of an IoT advertising landscape; in particular,
complex advertising strategies that truly consider we characterize the main entities involved as well
context awareness. For example, a car driver could as the interactions between them. Section VI
receive customized ads from roadside digital outlines the key challenges to be addressed for
successfully enabling IoT advertising. Finally, we getting tired, as he has been driving for too long.
conclude in Section VII. Therefore, Bob might be prompted with the coordinates
of the best local Cuban cafe on the GPS along with a
voice message suggesting to have a coffee there.
II. AN EXAMPLE OF AN IOT ADVERTISING SCENARIO We propose an IoT advertising platform that behaves
IN-CAR ADVERTISING as an intermediary (i.e., a broker) between advertisers
(the festival promoters), end-users (Alice, Bob, and
Connected smart vehicles are one of the most Charlie), and possibly publishers, the same way well-
dominant trends of the IoT industry: automakers known ad networks do in the context of Internet
are indeed putting a lot of effort to equip their advertising. Note though that in IoT, several entities can
vehicles with an increasing set of computational play the role of “publisher”, which is not limited to a
sensors and devices. single web resource provider, but it may be a composite
With millions of smart vehicles going around – entity with several IoT devices. As such, the automaker,
each one carrying possibly multiple passengers – as well as any other device embedded in the car or
automobiles are no longer just mechanical dynamically linked to it, may act as publisher. Providing
machines used by people to move from point A to the IoT ad network can gather information from smart
point B; rather, they are mobile, interconnected, vehicles and passengers traveling around a specific
and complex nodes constituting a dynamic and geographic area, that information can be further
distributed computing system. This opens up new matched against a set of candidate advertisements,
opportunities for developers who can leverage which in turn are conveyed to the right target. Note that
such an environment to build novel application and triggering of ad requests is somewhat transparent to the
services. In particular, smart vehicles – in fact, end user, i.e., we do not conjure any explicit
passengers traveling on board of those – may publishersubscriber mechanism between end users and
become interesting “targets” for advertisers who advertisers. On the other hand, users must have control
want to sponsor their businesses. over their data, which in turn may be used by the IoT ad
Assume a family of three is traveling in their smart network for targeting.
car; their plan is to drive to a seaside destination a few Figure 1 depicts the scenario above, where Alice, Bob,
hours away from their home and spend the weekend and
there. To do so, they rely on the GPS navigation system Charlie all receive their targeted advertising messages.
embedded in their car. Bob is actually driving the car; he The IoT ad network is responsible for choosing the most
is a forty-five years old medical doctor and he likes relevant advertisements and it delivers them through
Cuban food. Alice – Bob’s wife – is forty and an architect. one or more IoT devices that are either embedded in the
She is really passionate about fashion design and car (e.g., the head-up display and the GPS) or
shopping. Sitting in the back of the car, Charlie – their temporarily joined to the car (e.g., the passengers’
son – is a technology-enthusiast teenager who is smartphones).
listening to his favorite indie rock music from his
smartphone. Suppose there exists a mechanism for
profiling passengers traveling on the same smart vehicle,
either explicitly or implicitly. In other words, we assume
the smart car can keep track of each passenger’s profile.
Such a profile needs to be built only from data which the
user agrees to share with the surrounding IoT
environment.
Suppose these travelers are about to cross a city
where an iconic summer music festival takes place.
Interestingly, an emerging rock band is going to perform
on stage the same evening. Festival promoters have
already advertised that event through analog (e.g.,
newspapers and small billboards) and digital (e.g., the
city’s website) channels. However, they would also like
to take advantage of an IoT ad network to send more
targeted and dynamic sponsored messages, namely to Fig. 1. Targeted ads triggered by the IoT environment (e.g., a
smart car traveling close by a smart city) are delivered to end
reach out to possibly interested people who happen to
users on IoT devices via an intermediate IoT ad network.
be around, such as Charlie.
Assume Charlie gets an advertisement on the music We claim that IoT represents a huge
app installed on his smartphone, and he convinces his opportunity for marketers who may want to
parents to stop to attend the concert. Other similar leverage the IoT ecosystem to increase their
advertising messages might be delivered to Alice and targeted audience. Indeed, although online
Bob as well. For example, Alice could be suggested to advertising is already a multibillion-dollar market,
visit the city’s shopping mall on her dedicated portion of we believe one of its limitations is that it is
the car’s head-up display. Furthermore, the eye-tracking essentially based on the activities users perform on
sensors installed in the car could detect that Bob is the web. Instead, IoT advertising will overcome this
limitation by bringing advertisement messages to
users interacting with the IoT environment (which
is potentially much larger than the web).

III.HOW INTERNET
ADVERTISING WORKS TODAY
The general idea behind Internet advertising is
to allow web content publishers to monetize by Fig. 2. High-level architecture of traditional online advertising.
reserving some predefined slots on their web pages
to display ads. On the other hand, advertisers
compete for taking those slots and are keen on The workflow is as follows:
paying publishers in exchange for that. Actually,
publishers often rely on third-party entities – called • The user accesses a service exposed by the
ad networks – which free them from running their publisher,
own ad servers; ad networks decide on behalf of e.g., using HTTP GET (1).
publishers which ads should be placed in which
• The publisher responses with the “core”
slots, when, and to whom. Furthermore,
content/service originally requested (2).
advertisers partner with several ad networks to
optimize their return on investment for their ad • The publisher also asks its partner ad network to
campaigns. Finally, ad networks charge advertisers fetch ads which best match user’s profile, and
for serving their ads according to a specific ad are eventually shown to the user within the
pricing model, e.g., cost per mille impressions same content delivered before (3).
(CPM) or cost per click (CPC), and share a fraction
of this revenue with the publishers where those • The ad network uses profile information during
ads are impressed [8]. the real-time auction which takes place on the
At the heart of online advertising, there is a ad exchange to select advertisements that are
real-time auction process. This runs within an ad expected to generate the highest revenue (4).
exchange to populate an ad slot with an ad
creative1. For each ad request, there are multiple • The ad network instructs the publisher on how
competing advertisers bidding for that ad slot. And, to tell the user how to fetch the selected ad (5–
before any ad is served, publishers and advertisers 6).
outline a number of ad serving requirements, such
• Finally, the user requests (7) and retrieves (8)
as budget, when the ad should be displayed as well the actual ad to be displayed.
as targeting information.
In particular, targeted advertising allows to deliver As it turns out from the description above, there is a
sponsored contents that are more likely tailored to each clear event which activates an ad request, i.e., the user
user’s profile, which is either explicitly collected (e.g., accessing a resource exposed by a web publisher.
through the set of user queries submitted to the search Conversely, in the IoT world that triggering event might
engine in the case of sponsored search) or implicitly be less explicit (i.e., the user interacting with IoT
derived (e.g., from user’s browsing history in the case of devices). Nevertheless, in Section V, we discuss how the
native advertising) [10], [11]. The auction process uses scheme described above can be adapted to the context
all those requirements to match up each ad request with of future IoT advertising.
the “best” ad creative so as to maximize profit for the
publisher. IV.IOT KEY
Figure 2 shows the high-level architecture of current FEATURES
online advertising systems. Although the actual
architecture can be more complex than the figure, the The IoT stack is normally described as a four-
main entities involved are: the user who typically sits layer infrastructure. The first layer defines how the
behind a web browser or a mobile app; the publisher smart physical world (e.g., networked-enabled
(i.e., a service provider) who exposes some “service” to devices, devices embedded with sensors) interact
the user (e.g., a web content provider like cnn.com or a with the physical world. The second layer is in
web search engine like Google or Yahoo); the advertiser charge of providing the necessary connectivity
who wants to promote its products and possibly attract between devices and the Internet. Further, a third
new customers by leveraging the user base of the layer incorporates data aggregation and other
publisher; the ad network that participates in the ad preliminary data processing. Finally, the fourth
exchange and acts as intermediary between the layer is in charge of feeding the control centers and
publisher and the advertiser. providing IoT cloud-based services [12]. In general,
IoT bounds a cooperative relationship among
computing systems, devices, and users with these
1 An ad creative is the actual advertisement message (e.g., layers.
text and image) impressed on the slot.
 Connectivity: A crucial element in IoT is the high to be successful. Our IoT advertising model consists
connectivity required among devices, servers, of three layers, each
and/or service control centers. Indeed, high-speed one composed of several entities: the bottom layer (IoT
connectivity is necessary in order to cope with real- Physical Layer) contains physical IoT devices; the middle
time applications and the level of cooperation layer (IoT Advertising Middleware) coincides with the
expected from IoT devices. Currently, IoT IoT Advertising Coordinator, which allows physical IoT
connectivity is guaranteed by traditional network devices to interface with the upper layer (IoT Advertising
protocols and technologies like WiFi, Bluetooth Ecosystem), and in particular with the IoT Publisher.
Smart, and Device-to-Device (D2D) In the remaining of this section, we discuss the role and
communications. IEEE and the IETF are designing
new communications protocols specifically devised
for IoT [13]. These protocols (i.e., IEEE 802.15.4e,
6LoWPAN, LoRa) are intended to homogenize the
IoT low-energy communication environment
among the huge IoT device diversity.
Resource availability: This defines the amount
of computing resources available to implement IoT
services. In general, IoT devices can be categorized
into two groups: resource-rich, with faster CPUs
and higher memory availability and resourcelimited
devices, with limited memory and low-performance
CPUs. Note that the way IoT devices interact with
users (e.g., display availability, user-input enabled
devices, etc.) depends on the available resources
[14].
Power consumption: The nature of IoT Fig. 3. The proposed IoT advertising model consists of three layers: IoT
applications imposes several power constraints on Physical Layer, IoT Advertising Middleware, and IoT Advertising
the devices. In general, IoT devices are meant to be Ecosystem. characteristics of each entity separately.
remotely monitored, autonomous, wearable,
and/or with high mobility. These characteristics A. IoT Advertiser
define the specific power restrictions for every
application. This represents an entity which would like to take
Complexity and Scalability: Today, IoT devices advantage of IoT to advertise its own products/services
can be found in several user-oriented (e.g., smart such as the music festival promoters in the use case
home, wearables devices) and industrial (e.g., discussed above. It is expected to interact with other
smart grid, healthcare IoT) applications. The actors of the advertising ecosystem in the same way
different IoT architectures need to be scalable to web advertisers do on traditional Internet advertising.
handle the constant flow of new devices and the Due to the high diversity of devices involved, the IoT
alwaysincreasing set of new services and advertiser needs to conceive and design its campaign for
applications. heterogeneous targets, i.e., newer ad formats, which are
not necessarily visual (e.g., acoustic messages), as
opposed to traditional banners displayed on web
V.A VISION FOR AN IOT browsers or mobile apps. Moreover, targeting criteria
may go beyond just user’s demographics and/or
ADVERTISING LANDSCAPE geolocation; in fact, the contextual environment will
The ultimate aim of IoT is to provide new play a crucial role in the ad matching phase.
applications and services by taking advantage of
B. IoT Ad Network and IoT Ad
the IoT features discussed above. Different from
the simplistic approach of utilizing traditional Exchange
legacy sensors combined with decision entities, the The IoT ad network, in combination with the IoT ad
high connectivity and intelligence present in IoT exchange will be responsible for matching the most
along with the possibility of continuous scalability, profitable ads with target IoT publishers on behalf of
allow building a wide pool of applications based on both the publisher and the advertiser. This can be
users’ generated IoT-data. Among those, expanding achieved in the same way as traditional ad networks
the traditional Internet advertising marketplace is interact with ad exchanges for Internet advertising, i.e.,
one of the most promising. through real-time auctions. Moreover, differently from
To enable the IoT advertisement vision, we Internet advertising where those auctions are triggered
introduce our model of an IoT advertising by the user requesting a resource from a web publisher,
architecture (Figure 3). Despite this is clearly in IoT such events can be extremely blurry as the user
inspired by the Internet advertising architecture keeps constantly interacting with her surrounding IoT
(Figure 2), IoT advertising has its own peculiarities, environment. That means IoT ad networks and ad
and therefore, deserves a dedicated infrastructure
exchanges may need to operate at an even larger scale anticipating the user’s needs not based on
and higher rate. what he/she browses, but based on what
he/she is and what he/she does.
C. IoT Publisher
• Context awareness: IoT advertising will
The role of IoT publisher is not limited to a web adapt to new contexts, that is, the
resource provider anymore. An IoT publisher can rather advertisement strategy will also focus on
be thought of an ensemble of IoT devices, which the location, time, and the type of activity
collectively cooperate to implement and expose to the the user is performing (e.g., a regular
user multiple functionalities, as well as to deliver traveler can receive ads based on the most
advertisements. For instance, the smart vehicle visited restaurants and hotels during
introduced in our use case is a possible example of an lunchtime).
IoT publisher. The smart vehicle is indeed composed of
several embedded IoT atomic devices (e.g., the GPS, the • Services/Features: IoT advertising
tire controller, the sound system), each one ecosystem can make use of an unlimited
implementing its own communication standard and number of features to know more about
exposing a specific functionality through its own user the user (e.g., most visited locations,
interface. In addition, many other IoT devices can driving mode, behavioral characteristics).
dynamically and temporarily join the smart vehicle (e.g., That will translate into a new set of
the smartphones of car passengers). services from the IoT advertising landscape
(e.g., announcing upcoming events
D. IoT Advertising Coordinator with better price deals, lower car insurance due
to the driver record directly derived from the
The role of IoT advertising coordinator is smart car, etc.).
twofold: On the one hand, it allows bottom-layer
IoT devices to expose themselves as a single IoT • Security/Privacy: User security and privacy
publisher entity to the upper-layer advertising protection will impact the new IoT
ecosystem. On the other hand, it is responsible for advertising model in two different ways.
dispatching and delivering advertisements coming First, the coordinator needs to be
from advertising ecosystem down to physical IoT transparent to the implementation of
devices, and in turn, to the end user. To achieve traditional (or any new) IoT security
both those capabilities, the IoT advertising mechanisms. Second, these security
coordinator makes use of several subcomponents. mechanisms will inevitably limit the
Among those, we focus on three of them: (i) IoT amount and type of data that can be
Aggregator, (ii) IoT Profiler, and (iii) IoT Ad extracted from IoT devices and will scarce
Dispatcher. Those are responsible for: the quality of the user’s digital fingerprint.
• Device capabilities: The coordinator may
• Unifying different communication
have to deal with devices supporting a
standards utilized in a vast variety of IoT
broader spectrum of advertising formats
devices, so they can all respond to the
by themselves (e.g., smartwatches have
specific advertisement needs.
full display capabilities and adequate
• Providing a cross-platform that will computing resources). Conversely, other
translate IoTcustomer interaction into devices would either accept only custom,
usable data for real-time effective resource-friendly ad formats (e.g., acoustic
advertisement (i.e., collecting meaningful messages sent to smart speakers) or rely
metadata or “profiles”, which can, in turn, on other devices with more capabilities
be exploited during ad matching at the (e.g., the smart lighting system may use
layer above). the client application running on the
smartphone to interact with the user). In
• Managing the actual delivery of this regard, the ad dispatcher will have a
advertisements to the target IoT device, crucial role in deciding what specific types
and therefore to the user, according to of ads to generate/integrate from/to the
specific supported ad formats. different devices and how those ads can be
delivered to the user.
More specifically, the ability of the IoT advertising
coordinator to take advantage of IoT devices and Furthermore, the sensors present in smart devices
user identification via digital fingerprinting will and interacting with users will play a major role in
open the door to new advertising strategies. These profiling what the user does (e.g., presence sensor can
might consider the following key aspects: report when the user leaves the house) and the specific
context of such activities (e.g., Saturday night). These
• User profile: IoT advertising will vary based constitute key elements for a more effective advertising
on the actual recipient (age range, gender, (e.g., restaurants and nightclubs). Eventually, to be fully
known user behavior) so we can have ads effective in a fast-changing and very limited power-
consuming IoT world, the amount of data required to can get from devices with visual
characterize users needs to be minimized while coping capabilities is expected to be higher.
with the demand imposed by the proposed IoT
advertising model. In this context, the IoT advertising C. Security and Privacy Challenges
coordinator will “translate” data flow from/to IoT
devices into a common language and, more importantly, Integrating IoT into the traditional advertising
it will adapt IoT requirements to the wellknown Internet model poses security challenges for customers,
advertising model to enable the new IoT advertising advertisers, and publishers. Some of the security
ecosystem. Finally, timing and geographical distribution challenges that need to be overcome are the
of sensors will influence the effectiveness of the IoT following:
Advertising Coordinator by (1) effectively using user
• Due to the high diversity of devices and
location and IoT device availability to deliver the most
communication protocols in IoT, there
appropriated ad (e.g., take advantage of the presence of
exists a perpetual need for monitoring and
electronic road signals to show ads to drivers) and (2)
detecting new vulnerabilities and attacks in
timely deliver the right apps (e.g., nearby preferred
a constantly changing environment.
restaurants at lunchtime).
• Sensitive user data needs to be protected
not only from outsiders, but also from
VI.CHALLENGES OF malicious corporations that can misuse it.
IOT ADVERTISING • Users are not always aware of security risks
In this section, we analyze the possible key and a lot of effort needs to be done on the
challenges of IoT advertising. educational side.

A. Architectural Challenges • Current and new communication protocols

incorporate state-of-the-art protection
From the IoT advertising perspective, the current IoT mechanisms, but, in most cases, security is
architecture (see Section IV) has several challenges that optional and these protocols are insecure
need to be addressed. IoT device heterogeneity will add in default mode.
an extra burden to the IoT advertising coordinator. The
coordinator would need to deal with different memory, • The high level of interconnection in the IoT
CPU, energy, and sensor availability and capabilities, so opens creates more opportunities for
the right advertising strategy is chosen for every device malware and worms to spread over the
and user while keeping the required efficiency and network.
reliability of services. Moreover, IoT can be configured in • Advertisements should not become
several different network topologies, which require the intrusive for user privacy nor disrupt the
use of different network metrics to characterize the IoT user experience of the surrounding IoT
traffic and to successfully identify devices and users. environment.

B. Ad Content Delivery Challenges Traditionally, Internet advertising has compromised

user privacy by tracking people’s browsing habits.
Content delivery in IoT advertising involves IoT advertising would go further by tracking user
three different scopes: user profile, user location- behavior based on day-today activities. Here,
activity, and device capabilities. Content delivery dataveillance becomes more valuable considering
challenges will defy the capacity of the IoT devices that IoT user data is much more diverse if
to cope with the requirements of the proposed IoT compared with regular web browsing data.
advertising scheme in two main aspects: D. Fragmentation of IoT
1) Quality and quantity of available user Currently, there is not a single inter-operable
data: Different levels of data obtained framework that integrates all IoT devices and services. In
from the user will create user-based fact, despite the efforts to design dedicated protocols
digital signatures (i.e., user profile) with for IoT [13], the current IoT ecosystem offers several
different quality levels. Also, different options for developers to write smart apps using a
permission policies can impact negatively variety of different programming architectures (e.g.
on the quality of users’ activity/location SmartThings, OpenHAB, and Apple Home Kit). Also,
tracking processes. multiple combinations of standards and protocols are
2) Device capabilities: In cases where IoT possible (e.g., Communications: IPv4/IPv6, RPL,
device cooperation is not possible, the 6LowPAN, Data: MOTT, CoAP, AMPQ, Websocket;
delivery of the advertisement content to Device Management: TR-069, OMA-DM; Transport: Wifi,
the user will be exclusively defined by the Bluetooth, LPWAN, NFC; Device Discovery: Physical
device capacity. For instance, the amount Web, mDNS, DNS-
of advertisement content that the user SD; Device Identification: EPC, uCode, URIs). The
proposed IoT advertisement middleware should be able
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billions of dollars and is one of the fastest growing online
businesses. Nevertheless, it is still restricted to web
browser-based and, more recently, mobile in-app
contexts.
The Internet of Things (IoT) will open up a novel,
largescale, pervasive digital advertising landscape; in
other words, a new IoT advertising marketplace that
takes advantage of a huge collection of smart devices,
such as wearables, home appliances, vehicles, and many
other connected digital instruments, which end users
constantly interact with in their daily lives.
In this paper, we introduce the architecture of an IoT
advertising platform and its enabling components. We
also discuss possible key challenges to implement such a
platform with a special focus on issues related to
advertisement delivery, security, and privacy of the user.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work
defining the IoT advertising and discussing possible
enabling solutions for it. We expect our work will impact
both upcoming researches on this topic, and the
development of new products at scale in the industry.

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