How AI is Changing Personalization Strategies

Yesterday, one of our customers seeing significant winback success with AI Decisioning asked me: "So should we just kill our personas?" They were half-joking, but it’s a great question. My answer? Absolutely not. Personas aren’t dead, but their role in marketing is definitely changing. With AI decisioning agents delivering 1:1 personalization, you aren't orchestrating communications based on personas. Instead, you let AI learn from individual customer attributes and behaviors to decide what each user receives. Don't use a "busy professional" persona to decide that a customer gets a productivity message on Tuesday at 9am. Let an AI agent make that decision using every data point about that customer, like that individual's viewing and email engagement history. I think we need to make an important distinction though: audiences aren't personas. The audiences you create to target campaigns become less relevant with AI Decisioning—as AI finds the right messages for the right individuals. But personas certainly still matter for marketing and creative strategy. Which customer problems should you prioritize? What messaging themes should you explore? What positioning will resonate in your next product launch? These are still questions that require deep understanding of customer types. AI Decisioning handles the “who gets what, when.” Personas guide the "what problems are we solving and how." The best marketers will need to get both right to scale successfully. 

You've spent decades perfecting B2B & B2C marketing. Now AI is pushing us toward something different: B2Me. I realized this some weeks ago, while scrolling my phone at midnight (no judgment, please). Somehow, I'd gone from checking LinkedIn to getting sucked into cottagecore TikTok for two hours straight. I had no idea "cottagecore" was even an interest of mine, but that's precisely the point. My new article just went live in Search Engine Journal, and it dives into this shift from B2B and B2C to what I call B2Me, ie, from broad demographics to segments of one. It explores how AI is exposing what we've always known: personas like "Marketing Mike who loves skateboarding and avocado toast" were always fiction. The real Mike bought a motorcycle, gave up skateboarding years ago, and secretly loves gas station hot dogs. But we're still marketing to the cardboard cutout version. I've spent months watching companies claim they're doing "personalized marketing" when they're really just doing demographic micro-segmentation with fancier plumbing. One SaaS company's big AI breakthrough? Different subject lines for "Marketing Managers" versus "Marketing Directors." That's not B2Me. That's lipstick on a persona. The article covers: - Why most "AI personalization" isn't actually personal. - How to target behavior instead of job titles. - Why brand becomes your secret weapon when AI mediates decisions. - The fine line between "smart" and "sneaky" marketing. Because what I've learned is AI can spot patterns, but only humans create meaning. Only we build trust. Only we decide what truly matters. And maybe, just maybe, we can finally retire Marketing Mike. #B2MeMarketing #AIMarketing #hicm #SearchEngineJournal

One of the most pressing issues of marketers today is STILL personalization. Is this surprising to anyone? Not me. I've been talking about it since the ExactTarget email marketing days of 2012. We all expect personalization. We all want relevance. We are trained as consumers to WANT relevance. We skip ads that don't make sense... like the software pitch in the middle of my Hell's Kitchen binges. We bounce from sites that are generic... like a homepage that uses words like "synergies" and "next-gen transformation" but never tells you what the product does or the pain it solves. We expect Amazon to know what we want before we do... like reordering dog food before Asher gets pissed at you. We get annoyed when Spotify recommends a playlist that's not even close to our mood. We scroll past emails that say "Hey {FirstName}” because it would be a lot cooler if our first name were actually FirstName, but it's not. And that same behavior is baked into B2B. Buyers don’t want to hunt for why your product matters. They want it right there. In our FACE, written for Me/Us. This is the first time in my career that I believe AI is making that possible without long production schedules or tons of $$$$. In minutes, you can create truly personalized landing pages by account, industry, or persona. Two great examples: Tofu Pages and Backstroke TOFU Pages is a Chrome extension. No dev. No rebuilds. Just relevance. You should hit up Elaine Zelby for a sneak peak. Or, ya know, use AI to find the cool YT video. Another example? Backstroke. They’re making every email in your outbound sequence smarter by syncing it to where the buyer is in the funnel, so your message evolves with their intent. F***ing cool. Here's what I've always understood as a marketer: Relevance wins... always has. Now, we are lucky to have the tools to keep up.