Real-Time Marketing System at Play
Play wanted to move its marketing decisions from batch to real time. Its existing platform's real-time extension performed poorly, so Play implemented Nussknacker for high-throughput event processing and time-window analysis.
Challenge
Play ran its marketing campaigns in batch. A customer event could wait days before a campaign reacted to it, and by then the offer was often irrelevant or already outdated.
The real-time extension of Play's existing marketing platform performed poorly. A marketing engine at Play has to keep up with 13 million users, more than 400 000 events per second on average and over 900 000 at peak.
Play needed an engine that handles this volume with time-window analysis, lets marketers manage campaign rules without developers, and sends decisions to every marketing channel from one place.
Solution highlights
Transformed batch-based marketing campaigns into real-time interactions
Eliminated multiple-day delays in campaign execution
Addressed the challenge of managing complex business rules and campaign logic
Resolved the issue of sending irrelevant or outdated offers to customers
100 active streaming marketing campaigns, 95 batch marketing campaigns
Decisions are sent to marketing channels (actions), telco systems (service upgrades), and loyalty programs (bonus points)
Marketing channels covered: sms, mms, rcs, email, mobile devices push & pull, ivr, and telesales; all channels managed together
Real Time Marketing System's Features
Tool for non-technical users
Nussknacker simplifies Flink, time windows, data enrichment, and API calls, presenting decision algorithms as intuitive graphs instead of code. Business rules are managed in decision tables, enabling easy updates without specialized IT skills. This frees teams to focus on business priorities over technical challenges.
Single solution
The Nussknacker Designer simplifies creating decisioning scenarios for batch, streaming, and request-response engines. Custom components provide a unified view across channels (SMS, email, telesales, push, pull), enabling seamless multi-channel marketing. Using a single tech stack (Kafka, Flink, Redis, Nussknacker) across business domains ensured high performance with no issues in throughput or latency. Flink's support for both streaming and batch processing enabled this unified approach, allowing the client to create cross-domain and technical scenarios (like ETL) with greater cohesion and less redundancy compared to off-the-shelf solutions.
Extendability
Nussknacker is a versatile, domain-neutral tool for building complex decisioning algorithms, including enrichers, time-window aggregates, and ML model inference. The Client uses it not only for individual marketing scenarios but also as a comprehensive communication management solution, with features like message deduplication, delivery tracking, history, and audit trails via a custom 'send-to-channel' component. Its extensibility allowed the Client to add custom components and menus to the Designer, streamlining use across all engines and business domains.
Data flow overview
Campaign development cycle
Looking for a Low-Code Real-Time Marketing?
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