From mass marketing to mass personalization

Marketing is changing fundamentally. It's not just about tactics, but how we build strategies, align them with business goals, and structure our marketing efforts. The tools we use, our relationship with sales and CS, and marketing's impact on revenue are all evolving.

Here are some examples of how mass personalization is taking shape:

• Instant Localization: Launch products and campaigns worldwide with locally adapted digital assets, personalized messages, and user lifecycle tailored individually for each user in every geography.
• Endless Content Creation: The cost of content production will become negligible, allowing us to create vast amounts of personalized content for each user at every stage of their journey. Companies like Blings.io (disclosure: my portfolio company) use AI to customize videos for global consumer brands, producing millions of personalized videos with a few clicks, exponentially boosting engagement and conversion rates.
• Emerging Channels and Companions: As we see companions for nutrition, fitness, and shopping, marketing messages will be integrated into these personal channels. This includes bots, chats, and various agents, making marketing more personal.
• Community-Based Growth via Multi-Segmentation and Engagement: AI can segment community members at an individual level, understanding what drives each one. Dynamo (another portfolio company) launched a tool for managing VIP players, enabling teams to handle five times more VIPs and triple engagement, exponentially increasing revenue.
• Convergence of Sales and Marketing: As marketing becomes more personal, it will gain an edge traditionally associated with sales. AI agents will ensure each potential customer receives a customized conversion path. These matters will push sales and marketing alignment into new boundaries.
• Hyper A/B Testing: Instead of optimized flows, we'll see AI generate large variations of persona, message, and channel combinations to test and optimize in hours, including bids, keywords, CTA buttons, microcopy, paywalls, and even the whole motion from PLG to PLS.

Some of these concepts are already in practice, and others are on the horizon. My portfolio companies are implementing these strategies, and I believe every CMO should start thinking in these directions.

Inspiration for this post came from Andrew Chen of a16z, a leader in the intersection of marketing and AI. He was also VP of Growth at Uber.        

A question for you: Where won't AI impact mass personalization?

Perhaps Brand Equity areas like Awareness, Reputation, and Sentiment will always need some level of mass marketing.

Or maybe authentic, error-ridden posts will remain to distinguish humans from machines. But even that, machines will eventually master.