Highly curated and algorithmically driven entertainment and social platforms have trained media consumers to expect responsive, hyper-personalized content experiences, but marketing content as a whole isn’t yet delivering a commensurate experience to audiences.  

While a high volume of the ad content we see is “personalized” in its delivery via audience targeting, and much of it is tailored to specific audiences in its execution via dynamic creative optimization, personalization in the storytelling itself has lagged behind, particularly in video.  

In a 2024 Deloitte survey, only 43% of surveyed consumers said that their customer experiences feel personalized, despite 61% of brands reported personalizing those experiences - nearly a 20-point delta. This isn’t a data gap - there’s never been more information available about consumers, and both marketers and agencies have developed sophisticated tools for synthesizing and analyzing that data to glean key insights. What we’re contending with is a storytelling gap, and to close it we’ll need to reimagine our system. 

To truly enable personalization through storytelling, the role of Production needs to complete a paradigm shift from that of execution to that of orchestration. In modern marketing, production as a discipline is becoming most fundamentally about system design: enabling build-out of creation architecture for content that is driven by intelligence, serves clients’ complex omnichannel needs, and can bend across the spectrum of audience personalization without breaking.  

Strategy, creative, production, data/tech and media can't remain sequential or separate endeavors; crucially, we must transition from production as a discrete, time-boxed and historically siloed stage of the creative process, to production as a continuous, connected content ecosystem.  

In high-level terms, this means radically transforming creative production from an output-based model to a systems-based model. 

Double-clicking into this new system: The industry’s trajectory makes clear that production from a procedural standpoint will continue almost indefinitely through the lifecycle of marketing content and all its potential uses and audiences.  

Production as a discipline has a crucial role to play in supporting creative teams as we collectively reimagine how to create and deliver original content that is structurally modular, and flexible enough to accommodate brands’ wide array of downstream needs.  

Generative AI pipelines make it exponentially easier and faster to produce a high volume of permutations tailored to individuals or audience segments, but that leap alone doesn't mean the content will be memorable or culturally resonant. In fact, it can risk the opposite - since our ability to generate nearly infinite variations is advancing so quickly, and it takes time to build durable pipelines that combine generative capabilities with the human-led essentials of governance, brand stewardship, and the taste to know what’s worth making.  

The caliber of our craft must remain paramount while we engage a systematized approach to deliver excellence at scale, underpinned by hybrid and virtual production-powered pipelines, and strategic, generatively driven solutions for specificity and differentiation - all with the essential governance in place.  

To do this successfully, we’ll need strong connective tissue across creative, production and media, with a spine of tech & data powering the entire endeavor. 

However, even if it were achievable, the future of content should not simply consist of unremitting hyper-personalization to narrowly defined audiences or individuals. Knowing who someone is and what they care about is hugely important, but marketers still need clarity on which stories and messages will resonate enough to have a real impact on both brand affinity and purchase decisions. That kind of resonance has many contributing factors, but is driven significantly by shared experience. 

Shared experience has of course always had fundamental importance in society and relationships, but today it seems to matter more than ever. With pop culture and media consumption fragmenting into ever-proliferating niches thanks to social, influencer and streaming, it’s harder for people to find community around something other people love, or even know about - so the opportunity for shared experience becomes even more meaningful and valuable.  

Over 10 million people attended the Taylor Swift Eras tour; certainly that’s driven by their love for the artist and the music, but I think it’s also driven by that human instinct to share one’s love for something with other people who love it too.  

Likewise, a truly great marketing campaign transcends a collection of targeted executions, to be an experience people recognize, talk about, share and feel part of, ideally even amplifying it themselves. The best campaigns become an intrinsic part of culture.  

Writing in the New York Times, cultural critic Jason Farago memorably argued that with the ubiquitous deluge of content flooding our senses today, content itself has become ever more disposable, “an infinite scroll and nothing to read” in a world where “everything is recorded but nothing is remembered.”  

This pronouncement may feel a bit extreme, but it reinforces the paradoxical truth that while there’s an ever-growing volume of content vying for audiences’ attention, there’s an inverse struggle to achieve any lasting impact. The challenge and the opportunity for marketers is to create storytelling that is both individually relevant AND culturally resonant - making it strong enough to break through the noise and engender an experience people can’t help but share.