Swrve’s new platform enables ‘payload’ targeting and triggering

Marketing platform Swrve is out with version 3.0 of its platform, key new features of which are “payload” targeting and triggering.

The company says other campaign tools only address the “outer shell” of an event, such as a search for a flight on a particular travel company’s app. But Swrve says it can now allow a marketer — for the first time — to target in real time the “payload” details inside each event, such as the data that indicates that the traveler searched for flights for business class for one flier from New York to London with checked bags.

The Swrve platform is employed for a brand’s marketing to existing and logged-in customers, rather than for the acquisition of new ones, and the payload targeting/triggering is available for customers of apps that utilize the Swrve software development kit (SDK). The targeted segment can consist of identified or anonymized users, depending on the preferences of the app owner, or it could point to a single individual.

By payload, Swrve means granular data within an event that can be used to segment an audience, find an individual user or signal a message to fire. In other words, the company says, “the attributes of an event [can be used] as targeting criteria.”

Previously, Vice President of Product Marketing Dave Wilt told me, marketers’ BI (business intelligence) teams would get this granular data through the app’s back end, hours or days after the event was created. Now, the event details — instead of just broad event data — can be utilized immediately for marketing messages.

So, instead of targeting based only on the fact that Customer A has purchased an airline ticket, the new platform can also target attributes within that ticket-purchase “payload.” For instance, the platform can act on the info that the traveler — who lives in Chicago — is going to LAX airport from Newark but returning to JFK, and, though the seat has not yet been chosen, the traveler selected a window seat on four of the last five flights purchased through this app.

The marketing messages, which can also be controlled by location or time, could advertise a hotel near JFK airport, since the platform knows the booked flight is a red-eye. They can be delivered as in-app notifications, push notifications to home screens, web messaging, email or notifications via over-the-top video platforms like Roku.

Here’s a screen showing the additional layers of data being added to an initial shell event as Boolean searches, in this case for the event of watching a video:

SDKs from other companies might be able to see this data, he said, but they can’t process it quickly enough for it to be useful in real time.

The previously existing real-time processing engine in the Swrve platform, Wilt said, is now being applied to these granular data payloads. This means they can now be acted upon at a speed of up to 162,000 different user attributes per second, each checked against the targeting criteria in real time.

There are no stats yet about whether this more granular targeting has better results than the older way, he said, but it allows “marketers to be more nimble.”

“They’re not waiting on the BI team,” he pointed out.

[Article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.