Taking the Cold Out Of IoT, Edge, & Emerging Tech

We’re coming to the end of another calendar year and, as always, here comes a truckload of industry predictions for 2021. As people with eyes on the future while living in the present (what else can you be when you’re one of the best ad agencies in Austin, TX, and the world?), we can’t help but be drawn to edge computing and the quickly evolving AI and emerging tech industries.

Here’s what those AWS, MS, and IoT brains are saying:

–Edge hosting will develop into its own growing market (or, oligopoly if you ask us).

–AI & machine learning (and its ever-evolution) will move to focus on the edge rather than at the data source.

–5G will spread, and not just from the big 3 cell phone carriers. We’ll need more to accommodate edge implementations.

–The shift in spending to edge computing will deplete spending in cloud growth, but maturing cloud models will be needed.

–With its increased adoption and adaption, competition will be based on customer experience (“fit, form, and function” as this Forrester report says)

–Extending the ecosystem will depend on CDNs (content delivery networks) and colocation vendors.

–Real-time responsiveness from anywhere is key.

IaaS (infrastructure as a service) is a thing now… that’s one way to wake up on a Monday morning.

As product naming experts and brand purpose finders, our perspective on this growth (more like slow explosion/expansion… like the universe) is based in connection with people. We wrote about one way of doing that in this industry here.

But the other ways, the ways everyone in this industry will need to brand themselves, is not as simple. It’s no longer just, “appeal with the ROI, not the tech” or “share your ‘why.’” While a population of buying power will still remain that needs to understand the importance of ease, convenience, connection, and sleek productivity, most people already know this. And standing out in this $5.2 trillion sea of competitors will be different. 

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and other big names will take a chunk of the industry. Their reputation precedes them and their maturity is nothing to discount. But with the growing needs of colocation vendors, CDNs, 5G extenders, and more, competition is abound because opportunity is abound. Smaller names have a good shot at partnering big or getting big themselves when they know their strength and placement, and market directly to decision makers before them in the pipeline. That is, they will need to not focus on the what, how, or even why of their brand, but rather the feel. What emotional benefit will come from the ROI that you promise through the what, how, and why? 

In Other Words (Meta)

From the minds of brand marketing strategists and seasoned brand builders, here’s the TL;DR of everything above.

This stage of industry growth is not one that needs to be marketed to with “sleek this” or “productivity that” or “streamline everything.” People know what they need, how it works, and why it’s necessary. They’re aware of how they can be helped in their job. But what about how they can be helped in how they feel about their jobs? Target key decision makers from your end of the pipeline with the emotional benefit of adopting your Why.

Market not the productivity, but the reduction in stress that comes from enhanced productivity. Market not the efficiency, but the addition of excitement that comes from streamlining a process. This is different from marketing the productivity or the streamlining– it’s marketing the personal, emotional benefit of the decision maker.

This is easier said than done, obviously. No one knows that better than us.

But you know what else no one knows better than us? Exactly how to frame you, name you, and brand you, until you’re exactly where you want to be. It’s all conversion rate optimization (what is CRO?) from there. And we could tell you how that works, or we can show you what it means for your psyche.

Actually, there’s one last third option. We could let our clients show you themselves.