Thanks to wearable technology, we may be on the verge of watching three screen ad campaigns transform into four. The three screens that marketers and advertisers currently target in the digital marketing space are computers, tablets, and smartphones. Can you guess what the forth screen could potentially be? Smartwatches.

Think about it. Smartwatches can serve as a complement to mobile advertising.

There are a few main goals with the traditional three screen strategy. The main goal is to create a consistent ad experience across each of the screens. An added dose of creativity and innovation can go a long way in conveying compelling messages in a manner that reflects the brand identity. That’s where smartwatches step in. With hypertargeting (based on location data,) smartwatches can deliver ad messages at the right time and place to the right person. It adds a more contextual element to the campaign. Imagine walking into a gallery of a museum, and receiving messages indicating that one of your friends already visited it, and their favorite painting is in that gallery. The forth screen also opens up a new set of opportunities to bring in new traffic, or even upsell. You can get an ad for free fries and a drink with the purchase of a burger at the new burger joint you just happened to be passing by.

One interesting thought to keep in mind is that when advertisers target the smartwatch, the rest of the Internet of Everything will follow suit in one way or another. Companies will then be able to collect a pool of data based on usage patterns across all the connected devices, and have a more accurate composite sketch of their target customers, and deliver ads and/or promotional offers accordingly.

There will be one struggle marketers will have to face when it comes to marketing to customers on their smartwatches: how will they get the customers to agree to view the ads? Many smartwatch owners feel overwhelmed by the influx of notifications from emails, texts, tweets, and Facebook updates. Because of that, they typically set their smartwatches so only the extra special notifications could actually go through. Companies realize that their customers tend to have the same relationship with their smartwatches as they do with their smartphones, and it is one that isn’t generally receptive to ads. Ads work well for TV, online, and print, but not nearly to the same degree with smartphones, so that’ll likely be the case with smartwatches as well.

But there is one way companies can get ahead of the game before smartwatches become the forth screen. And it’s simple: they must create a brand that customers actually like and would want to be associate with.

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