Socks and the Married Man.

“Data is the currency of the connected age, and it’s in data that new forms of creativity will emerge."   

--Bob Greenberg, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive of R/GA

I’m almost out of socks.

I mean I have plenty of socks, matched and otherwise, but you know, or my laundry bag knows because it’s connected to the cloud via the Internet of Things, you know, that I had a rough weekend and haven’t been able to get down to the laundry room.

I had forgotten, or not realized that I was almost out of socks, but then the Maytag down in the laundry room—machine number 6, my favorite machine, tweeted out, via the Internet of Things, that I hadn’t done my wash in a while.

Shame on me.

That’s the thing with the Internet of Things, there’s no place to hide, really. What with my connected laundry bag, my Maytag, even my interconnected box of Tide pods, notifying me that I hadn’t accessed them in a while, well, I was up a creek without a clean pair of socks.

Fortunately, just at the instant I was thinking I’d have to go sockless, or buy a pair of socks…my fabric softener tweeted me. “It really socks to go sockless. #April Fresh.”

Wow!

“Now that’s creative,” I was about to say, when my laundry detergent pinged me. “Sock it to me,” it said. “Bare feet really sock out loud.”

Just as I was absorbing that currency of the connected age, I got an email from Bloomingdale’s. The subject line read “The Agony of De-feet.”

You guessed it, their algorithm revealed I was down to my last argyle. They offered me a whopping 20% off socks.

Not to be out-done, I then received an ad on my Facebook feed from Brooks Brothers. “Sock it Up!” They said. They offered me four pairs for the price of three.

Let me state herewith, these new forms of data-driven creativity are amazing.

You could say they’ve knocked my socks off.