Market research has made tremendous strides over the last ten years in understanding how consumers' demographics can be used as a preliminary indicator of their attitudes and behaviors. With the advent of specialized online market research, a lot of hay has been made around behavioral and contextual marketing--two distinct disciplines that respectively seek to target consumers on the actions they take or the content they read on a give Web site.

But these complex crafts may be obsolete before they are every fully formed. In their place, completely new ways of targeting based on where, when and what is going on in a person’s surrounding environment could emerge.

Accessing the Web through a computer will become less and less common, thanks in part to a growing list of Web-enabled household appliances coming to marketing in the next 18 months. These include seemingly mundane appliances including refrigerators, alarm clocks and coffee makers. Yet, they herald a new era of the Internet age when someone may be as likely to get their daily headlines and personal email from their alarm clock as their laptop.

Smart refrigerators will notify owners when their running low on milk--or its expiration date has passed—but will a message for orange juice "stick" better if heard in the shower or read on the fridge with the morning's bowl of cereal?

Smart marketers will figure this out. And over the next fifty years, marketing study and insight will move beyond demographics and behaviors to try and match messaging to the activities and distractions in the surrounding environment for optimal effect.