Study: scale personalization, enhance engagement, and build consumer trust with generative AI.
Marketing teams are under pressure to deliver personalized content while marketing budgets are tightening. Marketers must deliver engaging, effective campaigns with timely and relevant content across audiences, channels, and platforms.
Generative AI represents a transformative force for enterprise content production, offering potential to scale creative output and opportunities for brand differentiation — while driving business value. It can help organizations accelerate content velocity, maintain competitive advantage, and realize previously unachievable marketing goals, such as true one-to-one personalization.
We surveyed 300 marketers and 700 consumers to help understand how marketers use content personalization tools to meet the growing demand for campaign personalization. This research explores perceptions of tailored content, the use of AI in marketing campaigns, and how views differ across demographics and channels.
Key findings.
97% of marketers surveyed believe that creating personalized content at scale is achievable, yet over two in three find it daunting.
26% of marketer respondents agree that AI-powered personalization will increase consumer brand loyalty.
56% of consumers studied want brands to use past purchases for personalizing content, and 52% want brands to use products viewed for personalization.
Three in four consumers agree that knowing content was AI-produced would either improve or not impact their likelihood of engaging with it.
Content personalization through the eyes of marketers.
As businesses strive to connect with their customers online, the importance of content personalization to meet individual needs cannot be overstated. To capture and hold their audience’s attention, brands must personalize their messaging and scale their marketing campaigns to deliver personalization for a variety of segments and personas across multiple products and sub-products. While over two-thirds of marketers surveyed find creating content at that scale daunting, 84% of small business marketers surveyed believe it is achievable. AI-powered content generation tools, such as Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, offer an effective solution for creatives and marketers to streamline, accelerate, and scale the creation process.
Adobe research reveals that marketers believe digital personalization stands on three pivotal pillars: crafting relevant content (74%), achieving targeted delivery (63%)—delivering the right message to the right person at the right time through optimal marketing channels—and gaining a deep understanding of customer profiles, desires, and behaviors (47%). These insights empower marketers to tailor their paid social ads and enable them to forge more meaningful connections with their audiences, leading to increased brand loyalty.
Insights and personalization are intertwined when it comes to strengthening consumer relationships. 97% of marketers surveyed agree that personalization leads to stronger customer relationships. But what do they believe are the most valuable data points, and how do they expect content creation for personalization to shift in 2025?
The most valuable data for targeting audiences.
Our study asked marketers which data they find most valuable for precisely targeting their customers. Insights such as past purchases (52%), products viewed (45%), age (44%), life stage (44%), and search history (39%) were all highlighted in the top five. Enterprise marketers surveyed rank life stage and age as the most critical data points for content personalization (51%). Understanding these data points can make a significant difference in crafting personalized and impactful marketing campaigns.
How personalized content will evolve in 2025.
Looking ahead, respondents shared their predictions on how personalized content will evolve this year. The future of personalized marketing is tied to advancements in technology, particularly in AI. Over a third of predictions referenced generative AI trends, with AI-powered recommendations (62%) leading the charge. This was followed by AI-generated visuals and text tailored to individual users (59%), illustrating a significant shift towards more nuanced and responsive content personalization tools.
Generational differences.
Examining generational differences, 54% of Gen Z marketers surveyed anticipate a rise in dynamic content that adjusts to user interactions in real-time which has potential to reshape how brands interact with younger audiences. This includes elements like homepages, product suggestions, and geo-targeted marketing campaigns. By tapping into these dynamic content features, brands can enhance engagement and relevance, especially among digitally native audiences.
AI-powered personalization.
When asked about the potential of AI-powered personalization to improve customer experiences,60% of marketers surveyed pinpointed greater personalization of marketing messages as the top benefit. This was closely followed by increased efficiency and speed of service (59%), highlighting the importance of marketing efficiency tools. The emphasis on efficiency demonstrates that marketers are continuously seeking ways to optimize and streamline their strategies.
These advancements in AI, combined with strategic campaign personalization, allow marketing professionals to enhance customer experiences and refine their journeys. As a testament to this evolution, a third of marketers surveyed expect AI-powered personalization to reduce friction in the customer journey, and over one in fourbelieve it will significantly boost brand loyalty. Integrating these insights into several marketing channels, such as paid social ads, can further optimize marketing campaigns, ensuring they are more effective and impactful for your desired audience.
Unlocking ROI with AI-powered content generation in Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing.
Within Adobe’s Global Marketing organization (GMO), like other modern marketing organizations, we face some content challenges — including customer expectations, channel growth, and ROI optimization. Unlike most others, though, we have a unique ability and responsibility to build marketing solutions to solve real marketing problems with our product teams.
Adobe’s GMO needs to generate huge amounts of fresh content, launch global campaigns across regions, test assets at scale, and track real-time performance, all while maintaining efficiency. Tasked with personalizing campaigns across hundreds of customer segments and meeting demands for enormous content volume, we realized that traditional production and delivery methods couldn’t take us where we needed to go. So, we looked to our creative and digital experience experts and collaborated to turn a vision into a reality.
Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing is a generative AI-first application that helps teams quickly create, activate, and measure on-brand campaign content. The technology’s agility and scalability, combined with brand guardrails, allow marketers to self-serve on-brand content to deliver data-driven, personalized experiences quickly.
The tool empowers marketers and creatives, while enabling creative ownership and unlocking the power of team partnership. Creatives are free to focus on bigger things — less manual work, more strategic ideas — while marketers can think more deeply about the brand and how they work with creative teams.
“Across all industries, there is an insatiable demand for content as customers expect every encounter with a brand to be personalized,” said Heather Freeland, chief brand officer at Adobe. “Marketing teams are struggling to keep up with the volume of visuals and copy needed to deliver campaigns at greater scale and speed across audiences, channels, and markets.”
“Just when this challenge seemed insurmountable, the emergence of generative AI is presenting creative and marketing teams with a new way to keep pace with customer demands while also breaking through with their brands.”
The content challenges we faced.
Adobe's GMO is a massive operation. The team orchestrates sophisticated campaigns across multiple channels and markets, sending billions of emails every year and targeting diverse audience segments worldwide in more than 40 languages.
Like many other enterprise marketing organizations in today’s content-hungry world, we faced obstacles. Our traditional production methods bottlenecked our workflows and slowed our entire marketing ecosystem. We couldn’t effectively produce the content volume required to deliver personalized, timely, and effective marketing at scale.
Among other limitations, the inability to generate enough content and variations meant:
Challenges in conducting comprehensive testing and using sophisticated optimization algorithms
Difficulty serving diverse audience segments because of insufficient relevant content and limited resources
According to Adobe research, 59% of marketing teams report content creation challenges similar to the ones we faced due to overwhelming demands and requests on creative teams.
“There is an insatiable demand for content as customers expect every encounter with a brand to be personalized. The emergence of generative AI is presenting creative and marketing teams with a new way to keep pace with customer demands while also breaking through with their brands.”
— Heather Freeland, Chief Brand Officer, Adobe
Consumer perceptions towards personalized content.
For marketers to create successful, personalized content — whether paid social ads or comprehensive marketing campaigns — they need to understand it through the eyes of the consumer, as different demographics will have different preferences. Understanding which personalization customers value most enables marketers to craft materials that resonate, build trust, and foster loyalty, positioning them as the brand of choice in a competitive landscape.
Personalized promotions and sales were ranked the most important by those surveyed (65%), followed by relevant product recommendations (35%), early access to new releases (22%), and content suggestions (22%).
Consumers recognize the value of brands using their data to personalize content, but they also actively set boundaries for how brands implement this. An overwhelming 98% of consumer respondents revealed they desire personalized experiences but demand control over the process. For these purposes, the top data points consumers want to share include past purchases (56%), products they’ve viewed (52%), their gender (47%), age (41%), and language (35%).
Transparency in content personalization tools and AI is also advantageous to consumers. According to our survey, 75% of respondents agree that knowing content was AI-generated would either improve or not impact their likelihood of engaging. Additionally, 56% feel confident that they could identify AI-produced content, with Gen Z being the most confident (74%) and Baby Boomers the least confident (42%).
How to reach each generation with personalized content.
The research provides valuable insights and practical strategies for reaching different generations across various industries and marketing channels with personalized content.
Breaking down the research by generation, Gen Z respondents show a higher affinity for personalized content from the consumer electronics industry, particularly music (45%) and video games (43%), more than any other industry. This contrasts with Baby Boomers, who prefer personalization in retail industry content, specifically from grocery stores (46%). By aligning content with generational interests, marketers can use tools like Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing to generate content at scale, enable personalized experiences that enhance engagement, and drive conversions across target demographics.
Our research shows that Millennials prefer personalized email campaigns (45%) and website content (40%), while Gen Z values social media personalization (51%). Overall, respondents who favor social media for personalized content seek recommendations based on products they've viewed (66%). Marketers can leverage these insights by tailoring their strategies. For example, email campaigns to engage Millennials and targeted social media ads for Gen Z.
In grocery industries, consumers prefer email-delivered personalized promotions and want to share past purchase data to facilitate this. Gamers, however, seek personalized content tailored to their specific interests on social media. Using targeted campaign personalization strategies enables marketers to fine-tune their approaches for each sector, ensuring their initiatives resonate with the intended audience and build long-term brand loyalty.
Generative AI applications for specific marketing use cases.
Conducting large-scale email and paid social testing for large campaigns was difficult, primarily because of the lack of content variations we could generate, given budget and time constraints. Failing to optimize content from performance data led to lower engagement rates and conversion metrics. When testing was possible, we could only test two versions of the subject line and preheader rather than the whole email. For paid media, we could often only create one or two variations, making it hard to utilize social platform targeting capabilities.
Solution
GenStudio for Performance Marketing creates at least four variations of each requested asset, providing different headlines, subjects, and body copy aligned to target personas and products. This solution lets us rapidly generate and test multiple content variations of entire emails and paid social ads while adhering to our brand guidelines. For email, we run A/B/n tests and multivariate analyses across different content elements, including subject lines, body copy, images, and calls to action. For paid social, we use Facebook and Instagram algorithms to serve the right content to the right audience.
Impact
In one of our first generative AI-powered email tests, we used GenStudio for Performance Marketing to quickly build and test five versions of an Adobe Photoshop email. It delivered a more than 10% increase in click-through rate, and a subsequent test reported a 57% increase in click-through rate for an Adobe Illustrator email. This content creation speed also allowed us to test new subject lines for a campaign every two weeks, resulting in 8.5% higher open rates. Testing scale and speed transformed our approach to content optimization, significantly enhancing our marketing performance and efficiency.
8.5% increase in open rates with email testing
2. Creating new, unique content for untapped audiences.
Challenge
Limited resources made creating personalized content for diverse audience segments difficult, resulting in missed opportunities and poor engagement across our entire customer base. For example, the lifecycle marketing team needed to serve 12 distinct audiences for our North American acquisition programs, but due to a content shortage, we were often restricted to serving only six. We could advertise 13 products broadly, but we lacked persona-specific assets to create differentiated messaging and content for each persona across social platforms.
Solution
Generative AI-powered content creation gives our marketers the speed and agility to target more audiences with content tailored to their preferences. Our tool enables easy personalization by using the same prompt and changing the target persona, creating on-brand variations across channels for different audiences.
Impact
We’re engaging more of our customer base with relevant content, driving superior marketing outcomes across diverse audience segments. Our lifecycle marketing team has doubled the distinct email experiences they provide for our North American acquisition campaigns — regularly reaching all 12 audiences and accelerating our revenue targets. For paid media, GenStudio for Performance Marketing allows us to create enough content for social platform algorithms to deliver the right content to the right audience consistently.
Accelerate and improve your marketing content with generative AI.
Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing is a game changer for the modern digital marketer. Our marketing teams now produce more on-brand assets faster for paid social ads and marketing emails. This means more personalized customer journeys and increased ROI We’re able to reduce fatigue and increase the volume and diversity of content in each program.
With our solution, the GMO team can test email and paid social at scale, dramatically increasing click-through and open rates. They can also create unique content for untapped audiences, improving marketing outcomes across segments.
Patrick Brown is the vice president of growth marketing and insights at Adobe. He focuses on driving sustainable global growth through acquisition and engagement marketing motions. His responsibilities include leading a global media operation across B2C and B2B segments, a marketing performance analytics practice, a marketing planning and ROI function, and a marketing engineering practice.
Methodology.
We surveyed 1,000 Americans (300 marketers and 700 consumers) to explore how different groups perceive personalized content. At a 95% confidence level, the consumer study has a 4% margin of error, while the marketer study has a 6% margin of error. Because this exploratory research relied on self-reported data, it's important to acknowledge that respondents may have biases or discrepancies between their answers and their actual experiences.
