Before introducing the technology, we need to briefly understand the business background. We must first understand marketing. The definition of marketing given by Philip Kotler, the "father of modern marketing": "An activity in which enterprises identify existing market needs to determine target consumer groups to provide services for them." Marketing itself is a relatively broad concept, and we The marketing businesses supported mainly include marketing activities (integrated marketing), effect marketing (marketing products), brand marketing, merchant self-marketing, etc. The Double 11 promotion mentioned above is a marketing activity, such as "New Year's Day", "Spring Festival No Closing", and "618 Promotion". These are all marketing activities. They meet the needs of most consumers under the corresponding marketing theme. , a marketing method that uses systematic and integrated marketing of marketing methods to form the breaking point of marketing climax. The marketing channel is generally a normalized marketing business, which operates for a long time and has a fixed traffic entrance, mentality and positioning. Such as Juhuasuan, tens of billions of subsidies, Taobao good prices, daily specials, etc.
The business scenario is composed of a series of products, including venues, channels, interactive gameplay, and live broadcast marketing components.
The marketing business process can be simply divided into two parts, organization and supply on the ToB side, and expression and transformation on the ToC side.
Organization and supply on the ToB side. Marketing is a platform-based business, and the platform is the starting point for business. The operation team formulates the investment strategy of the platform through the investment promotion system, including merchants, goods, rules, gameplay, etc. For example, they determine the theme and duration of the event, as well as the main benefits and gameplay, etc. Merchants can complete the product reporting and information supplement according to the requirements and their own business needs. The submitted products and gameplay are then selected by the product selection system to accurately match the supply side and the consumer side. Here is the area for investment promotion and product selection.
Expression and transformation of the ToC side. After the supply is ready, the next step is how to reach and present it to consumers.
There are many forms of undertaking, among which the more common ones are various venues, channel pages, live broadcasts, etc. We abstract them into marketing venues. For these marketing sites, the platform will design a series of content organization methods and traffic mechanisms. On the one hand, it will show consumers the best quality products and the best ways to play. On the other hand, it will help merchants exert their independent operation capabilities and improve services while obtaining Better traffic. Ultimately, the delivery system communicates the presentation of products and gameplay to consumers based on operational strategies and algorithms. This constitutes the area of construction and delivery.
The last step is the most critical conversion stage, the core of which is to let consumers clearly know the offer. In basic links such as product details, shopping carts, and ordering, on the one hand, consumers have a strong sense of experience through the rights issuance process; on the other hand, marketing benefit information is revealed through shopping guides and transaction links, allowing consumers to clearly perceive The composition of rights and interests creates a preferential experience and promotes the completion of the transaction.
-
Every year, nearly a million merchants participate in the Double 11 promotion, involving tens of millions of product registrations. This will involve information submission, rule verification, and activity rules. From the writing of operating rules, the display of merchant announcements to the final system execution, how to maintain the unity of text expression and execution logic? Each activity has many rules and requirements, involving many downstream and data indicators. Can the accuracy of data and the speed of system verification be improved?
-
For every major promotion, merchants must provide a large amount of materials as the core elements for expressing information on the massive promotion products, gameplay, and rights in the consumer shopping guide link. Material production is very energy-consuming. Large businesses will have their own professional designer teams, while many small businesses rely on their own PS. How to reduce the cost of merchant material production and maintenance through technical means?
-
The big promotion period contains a lot of business data and business status, including materials, discounts, gameplay, freight insurance, free shipping, etc. As a distribution center for data distribution on marketing links, marketing products are the source of supply for each marketing execution link and the key to collaboration and unification. How to ensure data consistency for tens of millions of products in numerous upstream and downstream systems during a major promotion cycle?
-
When a user gets a consumer coupon or a large discount, how can we help the user quickly find the product, complete the order, and enjoy the best discount?
-
Changes in product inventory, adjustments to merchant discounts, product purchase restrictions and other factors will all affect the price of the final consumer discount. The most important thing here is to ensure that "what you see is what you get" in price. This is not only the price expressed by the system text seen on the homepage, search, details, shopping cart, order, etc., but also the price expressed by the merchant's main image. How to ensure consistency in price expression?
-
Before and after major promotions, due to various commercial reasons, product prices may fluctuate. The platform and merchants provide users with price guarantee services. Faced with a large number of orders, how to accurately and quickly calculate price fluctuations and return the price difference to consumers in a timely manner.
-
During the Spring Festival Gala of a certain year, the host broadcast a lottery on Taobao. Faced with a user scale of 100 million, more than one million users participated in the lottery at the same time every second. How to ensure the stability of user draws under high concurrency? This extremely hot spot with high concurrent writing is not a simple single technical problem. The entire architecture will be challenged. Even the current limiting system used to provide system protection has been greatly challenged.
-
The venue serves as an exclusive venue for big sales, showing users what to buy and play during the big sales. The venue is a collection of shopping pages, a group of pages organized together in the form of a page shopping guide. In recent years, the content displayed at major promotion venues has become increasingly rich, including not only product pictures and prices, but also short videos, live broadcasts, interactive gameplay, etc. However, not all users use high-end equipment, and they will encounter great challenges when rendering responsible pages like the venue. How to improve the speed of page opening and improve the smoothness of page traffic for users with mid- to low-end devices is also a proposition we need to solve.
-
The interactive scenes of 3D&XR bring users an immersive experience that is interesting and vivid. However, 3D&XR production generally requires a relatively long cycle and cost, and the window period for hot spot marketing and event marketing is very valuable. We hope to precipitate the one-time production gameplay through productization. But the most difficult thing here is to understand 2D/3D/XR technology and find a suitable solution based on the current and future demands of marketing interactive scenarios.
The first is marketing business understanding and abstraction. The marketing business models are rich and timely. From a scenario perspective, whether online or offline, marketing activities can be carried out in various scenarios, such as e-commerce platforms, offline shopping malls, social media, etc. From a rhythm perspective, whether it is a traditional festival or a current hot topic, it is a point of opportunity, and business strategies may be adjusted flexibly in a timely manner. One of the core requirements of this feature for technology is delivery efficiency. When the business has an idea, whether it can be implemented quickly and win the precious time window. Therefore, product and technical architecture must be built on a stable and powerful basic platform and have rapid scalability. There are very high requirements for business understanding, domain abstraction and architecture design.
Second, is high availability. The marketing business itself is organized for a specific marketing scenario or theme, so it is naturally explosive and may even far exceed the peak order placement. For example, the Spring Festival Gala lottery method mentioned earlier has more than one million users participating every second. In addition, the marketing activity itself also has a high degree of attention. Once something goes wrong, it will have a huge negative impact. Therefore, high availability is a very important technical challenge.
In addition, intelligence is also a key point. The marketing business process is complex, involving the participation of multiple roles, and there are many interactions between systems. In order to reduce labor investment costs and improve business efficiency and effectiveness, products, technologies and algorithms need to be effectively combined.
最后，前沿技术的探索是不可或缺的。在数字化时代，营销创意的落地非常依赖技术的可行性。比如，AR、VR和智能设备等新兴技术正在改变营销方式和消费者体验。可以利用这些技术来打造更具创意和互动性的营销活动。
▐ 业务高效支撑
当然平台化架构只是基础，再此之上技术上还在做进一步演进和探索。
我们发现虽然实现单一能力点的扩展，但是部署、发布过程还是要跟着这个系统一起进行，功能变多了以后，系统也变得臃肿起来。为此，我们参考了docker容器的方案，实现了一套JVM级别轻量级容器解决方案，在代码层面把平台基础功能和业务定制扩展功能分开，扩展功能可以以插件形式实现热部署。这个方案可以帮助迭代和维护效率进一步提高，让调试/部署的耗时减少10倍以上。
另外，在某些特定领域，我们还在进一步探索低代码的方案。例如大促会场模块的实现，前端工程师以往大部分的时间都是做设计稿的还原，我们实现了一套设计稿智能生成前端代码的平台（imgcook）[01]，19年双11的会场模块 79.43%的线上代码由imgcook一键智能生成。
▐ 高可用
高可用针对单一场景都是有成熟解法的，但是结合业务场景可能就会有不同的方案。
在营销中高并发读的场景，主要是会场、频道等页面导购场景。这种场景面向都是用户端的流量，很多时候流量都是尖刺型的，在峰值瞬间比次峰值甚至会高几倍。所以这里设计上主要是避免预期外洪峰流量的影响，这里业务容灾兜底方案就比较重要了。目前投放系统有是多级限流做到自我保护，基于多级兜底机制保障保底业务表现。最悲观的情况，整个系统都挂了还是能保证最兜底的业务表现。在21年春晚的时候，脉冲流量远超预期，超过40%的请求都被限流了，但是用户端页面透出依然是正常的，也不影响用户进一步抽奖的动作。
说到抽奖，是一个典型的高并发写场景。这个场景类似于秒杀，在某个时刻会有百万到千万级的的用户同一时间涌入系统争抢。而权益本身是有限的，就要求需要在极短的时间内对红包的数量做正确的扣减，比如每秒扣减100w次，这个对现在任何系统、机器都是要突破物理瓶颈的。
如何既能保证用户顺利抽奖又不超发就成为一项非常困难的事情。
针对这种场景，业界里面比较成熟的方案是分布式库存扣减，即将库存提前分配到多个分桶中，不同用户路由到不同分桶进行扣减。但是在营销的场景中，常规的分桶方案会引入其他问题，包括分桶数的确定，分桶碎片问题，分桶库存回收问题等等。例如业务预算剩余3块钱分了10个桶，每个桶3毛钱，这时业务要发1元是无法发放出去的，这对调用方会带来非常大的业务问题（有预算却永远发不出去）。
上面是两个比较典型场景的高可用设计，很多时候都需要基于业务背景的考量去寻求最佳的解决方案。
▐ 数据化&智能化
相比传统链路，数据化的链路释放了60%以上的运营精力，另外在供给上也更加稳定，提升了业务效果。
▐ 前沿技术探索
关于前沿技术探索，我们更多的是关注与业务的结合点。
品牌营销、事件营销中有很多互动玩法的场景，用3D场景去承接能获得更好的效果。面对3D场景研发成本和周期长的问题，我们把互动玩法抽象成几种类似场景，例如品牌虚拟空间，虚拟形象养成。针对特定的场景，进一步细粒度的抽象出空间、组件和素材。再结合3D底层渲染引擎的规范，实现3D场景的构建。这跟上面提到的平台化抽象的思路类似，但是不同的是需要对3D建模和3D引擎有比较深入的理解，才能实现业务侧的编排。
而本轮AI技术爆发，我们看到了新技术在营销场景大量应用的潜力，也开始做一些尝试。
在商家素材提交场景中，为了适配因多个导购场景需要产生的多种图片尺寸规范。针对这种场景，我们在素材中心引入了AIGC的技术，实现了图片的智能剪裁。商家只需要提供一个图片素材，系统会自动帮助他们生产多种图片尺寸，目前仍在灰度和调优中。
另外在今年造物节，我们基于AIGC技术为用户带来更有新鲜感、创造性的营销互动玩法。
下一步做什么？
-
从商家角度 ，仍然有很多环节靠“人”驱动的，上面提到素材制作也仅仅是解决了多尺寸素材的问题，像多场景图生产、店铺封面等制作仍然需要去突破。 -
从用户角度 ，原来用户需求的表达，都是基于货相关的。而大模型突破了这层的限制，可以承接用户自然语言表达的需求，从现在的个性化到定制化。我们有可能突破现有的场的交互形式的产品，实现真正面向每个人的营销场，带来转化和复购大幅提高。 -
从运营角度，更精准的用户意图理解、更宽泛的货和内容理解，意味着可以更高效地进行供需匹配。原有的数据辅助运营体系有可能进一步突破。
以上就是营销技术的简单介绍，由于篇幅有限，很多细节没法详细说明。如果你对上面业务场景和技术问题感兴趣，希望在评论区和我们做进一步交流，也更希望邀请感兴趣的技术同学们加入我们，一起参与建设和创造新商业的前沿阵地。
感兴趣的同学们可以直接投简历到这个邮箱：[email protected]
本文分享自微信公众号 - 大淘宝技术（AlibabaMTT）。
如有侵权，请联系 [email protected] 删除。
本文参与“OSC源创计划”，欢迎正在阅读的你也加入，一起分享。