Personalization Paths

Before this work, Aki's approach to personalized creative was entirely reactive. A CPG brand would request geo-specific messaging and the team rebuilt creative for each market. A retailer would need offer lifecycle states and the team created equity, offer, and clipped variants from scratch. Every campaign meant custom strategy, bespoke builds, and extensive QA.

Three problems emerged:

1. Bottlenecks: Creative teams spent days rebuilding similar permutations for each campaign. No reusable templates existed.

2. Inconsistent Results: Without systematic strategy, performance varied wildly. Some campaigns saw strong lift from personalization, others showed minimal impact.

3. Market Risk: Competitors were starting to offer templated personalization as standard. We risked being seen as a premium "custom shop" that couldn't scale while the industry moved toward dynamic creative as table stakes.

The work started with an audit of 12 months of campaign history, examining every instance where the team had built creative variants for personalization. The catalog included variables like geography, retailer proximity, offer lifecycle states, time of day, weather conditions, audience intent, and product SKUs.

Geo + retailer appeared in dozens of campaigns. Offer lifecycle (Equity to Offer to Clipped) was nearly universal for incentive-heavy brands. Dayparting showed up consistently for QSR and CPG. Weather triggers worked for seasonal products. Repeating patterns emerged clearly.

Standardizing these patterns into reusable "Paths" could accelerate scoping, speed up execution with templates instead of net-new builds, improve consistency with proven approaches, enable better measurement with standardized KPIs, and create competitive differentiation.

"Personalization Path" emerged as campaign objective + signal set + feed specification + creative template + fallback rules + success metrics. This created a reusable decision framework and an operational system, not just a taxonomy.

A key insight that informed the Paths framework: It's okay to have a narrow scope for personalization. It's okay to speak to two audiences. It doesn't need to be this colossal multi-tier program.

Many marketers get excited with automation and want to personalize everything, leading to over-complexity, diluted messaging, and unclear ROI.

The Paths Approach: - Strategic Scoping: Use discretion to determine who you're talking to and why - Narrow Focus: It's okay to speak to two audiences rather than trying to personalize for everyone - Purpose-Driven: Each path has a clear objective (foot traffic, offer redemption, product awareness) - Right-Sized Solutions: Not every campaign needs a multi-tier program; sometimes a single path is the right answer

Paths were designed as reusable decision frameworks, not one-size-fits-all solutions. This strategic, selective approach differentiated Aki from competitors who offered "personalization for everything" without strategic thinking.

The critical transition was taking this internal framework and making it our client-facing offering. Working with sales leadership positioned Paths as our competitive differentiator.

Sales Enablement: One-pagers for each path family explained the approach, use cases, expected performance lift, and timeline. These became core assets in RFP responses and pitch decks.

Client Presentations: Mockups showed generic creative versus path-based personalization with clear message differences. Demonstrations showed how a single path could remain tight in scope or scale to thousands of variants through feed automation.

Competitive Positioning: The approach was framed as "strategic personalization frameworks" versus competitors' DCO-centric approach. We brought proven approaches backed by performance data, not just more versions.

Pricing Integration: Paths pricing aligned with the Creative Calculator (my pricing/scoping tool covered in another case study), ensuring transparent scoping based on path complexity, feed size, and creative requirements.