As consumers increasingly expect personalization from brands, it’s time for marketing organizations to strategically upgrade their focus.

In an email addressing you by name, you click on a link. It takes you to a website with content you find neither entertaining nor useful. How does that make you feel about the brand? It likely leaves you with a negative impression.

Once considered a standout feature that impressed customers, personalization has since evolved into a marketing must-have for success in a landscape that keeps growing more complex. As a result, brands are increasingly recognizing the need to integrate personalization into their marketing strategies to remain competitive. This demand is reflected in The State of Personalization, a recent survey of marketing executives conducted by the Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA), EY, and .monks. More than three-quarters (78%) of respondents recognize the significant untapped potential of personalization to help enhance their marketing efforts, while 61% reported that their organizations are either established or advanced in leveraging this game changer.

This emphasis may not be surprising, considering that the barriers to personalization have become relatively low. For example, years ago, companies started collecting first-party data, making basic email personalization easier to execute. However, many organizations — even those that consider themselves advanced in personalization — still rely on manual processes, choosing the longer route over leveraging technology for efficiency. In the survey, more than half of respondents from such advanced companies reported using manual methods to customize and adjust creative assets for different audiences.

Most companies are still far from being able to personalize at scale and deliver unique, relevant customer experiences consistently across all channels. But as personalization increasingly becomes a driving force behind effective marketing strategies, brands must adapt accordingly to meet consumers’ rising expectations. Content, which is most impactful when it’s personalized, is one of these expectations: nearly eight in 10 (79%) of survey respondents have seen demand for content increase in the past 12 months. To navigate the associated challenges, marketers need to fundamentally shift their focus across several key areas. Here are five critical shifts they must embrace to thrive in this new era of personalization:

Theme 1: from who to when, where and how

With so much data readily available, the main question evolves from “Who is our target audience?” to “When, where and how do we engage them?” To maximize impact and deliver personalization at the right moment, in the right place and through the most effective channels, marketers must focus on contextualizing consumers’ individual experiences.

Effective personalization isn’t possible without a thorough understanding of consumers’ preferences and needs — what they like, which channels they’re reachable on, how much they’re willing to spend and the contextualization of their interactions with content, for example. The challenge is that data points are often dispersed across various parts of the organization and platforms, both internally (e.g., first-party data) and externally (e.g., third-party data). For brands that want to personalize consistently across multiple audiences, the data must be readily available and with the right ID resolution, which allows for the accurate identification and integration of customer information.

Many brands, especially business-to-business companies, will need to implement aggressive data enrichment strategies across multiple providers to effectively target the right sectors, verticals and geographies. In the MMA survey, 63% of respondents said their organizations are planning to enhance content personalization by developing advanced audience segmentation and targeting capabilities.

Theme 2: from asset to experiential

Rather than considering marketing assets like products and ads as distinct, static items, we need to recognize the importance of creating dynamic, engaging experiences for consumers. Impactful personalization is about creating memorable interactions that resonate with people, rather than just promoting offerings.

From a customer perspective, personalization limited to a single channel can be underwhelming. Imagine clicking on a personalized email that links to a webpage with no information that interests you — similar to the situation we described earlier. So, it makes sense that almost half (46%) of survey respondents are developing multichannel orchestration for seamless experiences to strengthen their content personalization.

In addition, to create a real impact — not just engagement via clicks — marketers must work with the rest of the organization to produce experiences that are personalized from end to end. For CMOs, this can mean working more closely with the chief data officer, for instance, to better tie the web experience to the paid media experience. Successful conversion rates depend on a seamless buy flow experience — the process customers follow to make a purchase within the channel.

Theme 3: from owning the question to owning the answer

Gone are the days when marketers sought to control the narrative by asking questions to gather consumer insights. In the future, marketing performance will depend on organizations’ ability to predict or anticipate the answers and solutions consumers seek. This will allow brands to build trust and establish themselves as deeply empathetic to their customers

Consumers are shifting from simply typing questions into a search engine to using artificial intelligence (AI) tools for more nuanced inquiries. It’s the difference between typing “What is a television?” and entering “Tell me about TVs.” This change signifies a need for marketers to update their approaches.

A deeper understanding of consumer needs and a commitment to delivering relevant, informative content have become non-negotiable. As we mentioned above, over six in 10 survey respondents seek to develop advanced audience segmentation and targeting capabilities, so they can better personalize their content. And 47% of the senior marketers who responded are planning to develop real-time contextual personalization tools for that same objective. Additionally, integrating marketing channels will create a seamless experience that anticipates consumer inquiries and positions brands as trusted sources of information. With the continued decline in trust in brands, the focus must shift from simply asking questions to delivering comprehensive, authentic and empathetic answers that resonate with consumers.

Theme 4: from speed to agility

Speed in marketing execution remains important, but agility is what marketing organizations need, so they can adapt quickly as consumer preferences and market conditions change. Personalization requires flexibility and responsiveness. Marketers must be able to pivot strategies and tactics as needed to maintain relevance (e.g., via customer touchpoints or new content).

Personalization involves experimentation: testing, measuring, learning and adjusting content, offer and channel strategies. To execute all of this and deliver on their personalization strategies promptly and nimbly, organizations need more than automation. They must create agile pods and break down internal silos among the data, marketing, content creation and marketing operations teams.

We are observing a trend toward insourcing essential functions that can boost an organization’s agility. This shift allows companies to align their operating models more effectively, maximizing the value of these integrated pods when compared with traditional approaches. In the survey, 48% of the companies that are advanced in personalization have insourced their creative efforts — higher than the average of all participating companies (38%). While insourcing may not be suitable for all companies, reducing the cycle times for content briefing, creation, iteration and approval is what matters. Having an embedded agency could also help a business in this respect.

Theme 5: growth and scale

Demand for personalization will only continue to grow; brands must find ways to efficiently deliver tailored experiences to a larger audience without sacrificing quality. This will depend on their ability to successfully embrace agentic AI and data to scale personalization efforts effectively.

As brands strive to personalize at scale, the volume of content required — along with the necessary variations — will just continue to grow. That’s why 34% of the survey’s more advanced companies use AI to create or adapt creative assets, while 46% employ machine learning-driven dynamic creative optimization to automatically adjust the content they serve.

To fully enable automation around content, marketers must first align on common templates and modules that can work across multiple brands and product offerings. While content is often the first step in the deployment of generative AI, it’s essential to also consider AI-driven segmentation to refine audiences and maximize outcomes. As the volume of signals and data points increases, static audiences become more complex to manage. Marketers must be positioned to use agentic AI marketing workflows to automatically adjust their audiences based on early signs of engagement so that personalization remains effective and relevant. 

Conclusion 

Personalization is here to stay. Fully executing it at scale requires investments in data and technologies like agentic AI, as well as bold changes in operating models. CMOs should use their existing initiatives on personalization to demonstrate its value and fund reinvestment. For companies that are just starting their journey, proving value quickly means disrupting the current ways of working by establishing a small agile squad that can execute quickly, supported by embedded creative teams and hands-on involvement.