Goodbye Customer Data Platforms** – Welcome EDGE Marketing!

**This article is intended to stimulate innovation and thought leadership around future possibilities in marketing.

Gartner estimates that, “By 2025, 75% of data will be processed outside the traditional data center or cloud.”

Customer data volumes continue to grow with an increase in IoT devices and 5G network adoption. Sending all that device-generated data to a centralized customer data platform on cloud causes latency issues and hence a delay in responding to customers in real-time.

According to Stephen J Bigelow at TechTarget, edge computing is a distributed information technology (IT) architecture in which client data is processed at the periphery of the network, as close to the originating source as possible.

The question is, what if we apply the same concept to MarTech or marketing automation tools?

EDGE marketing is a concept of a distributed marketing technology (MarTech) architecture in which the consumer data is processed at the periphery (touchpoints) of the network, as close to the originating source as possible.

This vicinity to data at its source can deliver strong business benefits like quick insights, better response times and enables marketers to present the highly contextual and tailored messages to consumers or prospects in real time.

EDGE marketing facilitates marketers to interact with consumers / prospects in real-time and deliver the right content at the right time at the point of consumption.

EDGE marketing harnesses the increasing in-device computing capability to offer profound insights with predictive and prescriptive analytics in near-real time. This increased analytics capability in edge devices can power innovation to improve quality, enhance value, elevate customer experience and result in customer delight.

Let me explain – When you ask a question to your Echo, it has to process your speech, send it to the cloud / customer data platform, the CDP / cloud uncompresses that representation and process it — which might have to ring in another application interface like finding out the nearest pharmacy for buying a drug that’s readily available like CVS, Walmart, and then the cloud sends the answer to your Echo, and finally you find out that it is available at the CVS Pharmacy 3 lanes down your office.

One more, self-driving cars are, the ultimate example of edge computing. However, a step further, imagine you’re on a long drive and Alexa says, it’s been over 3 hours you haven’t eaten anything, and your battery is low. You will arrive at a McDonald’s in next 3 minutes. Shall I order a McChicken meal for you two while your Model S gets charged? Bingo!

The same can be applied to finding an ELSA outfit for your little girl or a scuba gear for your upcoming vacay, etc. One thing is for sure - COMPANIES WILL CONTROL EVEN MORE OF YOUR LIFE EXPERIENCES THAN THEY DO RIGHT NOW.

Use cases are plenty. However, I also see that EDGE Marketing is set for a disaster if the data analysis / intelligence at the EDGE is suboptimal because of a faulty equipment.

Look out for my next post 2.0 on how EDGE marketing will change the future of MarTech platforms and what it means for the future marketing in general across devices, data, structures, and marketing implementations.

Share your thoughts on EDGE Marketing in the comments below or write to me at [email protected] / [email protected]