In most direct marketing processes, you collect contact information, you send out a series of touches with relevant content, then based on the response, you spend more time and energy on those who are interested.
Wave Gliders collect enormous amounts of data and crunch the numbers distilling 4 gigabytes of raw data to a kilobyte of relevantinformation a client wants, for instance and then activate their Iridium satellite link to beam the result to servers on land.