Consumers in the digital age may wonder why they’re shown ads for products they bought just a day or two ago. The advertiser might have persuaded them to buy its particular brand instead — but it’s a bit late at that point. These and similar marketing misses result from data sets that lag behind real time, according to Anjul Bhambhri (pictured), vice president of platform engineering at Adobe Inc.

It’s all because that brand has a stale profile of the customer. “If they had the real-time customer profile, then there’s no way that they would be delivering or actioning based on that stale information,” Bhambhri said.

Bhambhri spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Adobe Summit in Las Vegas. They discussed the value of real-time data in digital marketing and Adobe’s latest cloud offerings (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

APIs abstract away data dilemmas

The problem is largely siloed data. Data for reporting or business intelligence offers a view of the customer, for instance. But it does not offer a real-time view of their behavior that can help companies deliver personalized messages to them. Much of the important real-time data is located at the edge, on mobile devices and the like.

“As we build predictive models on next best action, on the data that’s on the cloud, the scoring of the models has to happen on the edges where the events are occurring,” Bhambhri said. “This is a complicated engineering problem.”

The recently launched Adobe Experience Platform breaks down data silos across sales, marketing, and the edge devices. It provides one place for BI, reporting, artificial intelligence or machine learning to determine next best actions, content personalization, etc. They all feed into and produce the all-encompassing real-time customer profile, Bhambhri explained.

Collecting “hot data” from edge devices is important to rendering an accurate, up-to-the-minute profile. Latency and relevancy requirements are different for this type of data processing as opposed to BI, for instance. Adobe figures out the best technical organization for different types of data processes. For example, it may be SQL or NoSQL database queries in different cases. Then it provides application program interfaces on top.

“So we are abstracting all of that from the user,” Bhambhri said. “The applications are not going to break, because they’re writing to the APIs. So as technologies advance underneath, we make those right choices so that they’re getting the right latency and relevancy.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Adobe Summit 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Adobe Summit 2019. Neither Adobe Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE