It’s not a thesis but a fact: brands must deliver more content across more channels, ensure that content is actually engaging, and do it all on tighter budgets. To get this right, campaign personalization and contextualization—achievable at scale with the right AI strategy—must be part of that equation. Spray-and-pray approaches are going away, quickly, and nowhere is this more important than with high-impact video and audio campaigns.
The numbers make a compelling case that this shift is already working. A recent McKinsey report finds that companies using AI in their marketing and sales see a revenue uplift of 3-15% and a sales ROI uplift of 10-20%. But even more eye-opening: additional data from McKinsey shows that personalization—AI’s sweet spot—increases customer satisfaction by 20% and conversion rates by 10-15%. For brands willing to move quickly, there is (still) a rare opportunity to gain a specific competitive advantage.
The personalization paradox
IAB research shows that 90% of consumers actively prefer personalized ads, while the exponential growth in marketing channels demands more variations of every campaign. The execution challenge then becomes clear: traditional methods of creating deeply personalized ads are both labor-intensive and stubbornly resistant to scaling. Marketing teams and agencies face an impossible task—unless they embrace a radical shift in approach.
Transforming creativity at scale
Think about traditional personalized and contextualized ad creation: booking studio time, coordinating voice talent, and managing weeks-long production timelines—per ad variation. Want to account for different locations, time of day, weather, and local offers? That could mean 100+ versions of a single ad. Even with improved engagement metrics, the ROI simply doesn’t work.
A smart AI strategy fundamentally changes this. From a single completed creative, marketing teams and agencies can now generate and test countless personalized variations on video, CTV and audio ads in hours, not weeks. The production timeline? Compressed to minutes. That’s not just cost savings—it’s a complete transformation of what’s possible at scale.
Even more powerful: AI enables real-time campaign optimization. Instead of launching a new month-long project to test variations, marketers can now A/B test different creatives in flight, manage campaigns in real-time, and continuously fine-tune them based on performance metrics. AI offers the tools to easily manage blended media buying, matching video, CTV, and audio creative with media while leveraging dynamic creative optimization (DCO) to turn one ad into many and maximize performance across every channel. The result? Every ad becomes an opportunity for personalization and performance improvement.
AI as a creative catalyst
The traditional creative process is linear and fragmented. Creative teams are often briefed only after media teams make key decisions, resulting in inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and delays. Many brands continue to use non-optimized creatives simply because they lack the time or resources to make changes.
The speed of AI-powered production unlocks new creative possibilities: instead of betting everything on a single creative direction, teams can now rapidly explore different (and sometimes very different) approaches with their existing assets to see what sticks.
Here’s what that can look like in practice: computer vision can analyze every frame of your existing video content, automatically tagging context and creating a searchable library. From there, teams can quickly remix these assets—trying new music voiceovers, and visuals to create entirely different emotional impacts. What once would have been a major production becomes a matter of minutes, allowing teams to test multiple creative directions simultaneously. More creative risks can be taken, more variations can be tested, and better-performing campaigns bubble to the top.
A proof point
A recent ad campaign led by dentsu directly tested the performance of generic versus personalized contextual AI-generated audio ads, and found some remarkable results. Generic non-personalized ads created using AI drove a 3 percentage point increase in purchase intent, and a 9% increase in brand favorability. Improvements over the status quo, yes, but personalized variants were on another level. Personalized AI-generated ads outperformed generic ads with a massive 18% increase in purchase intent, and a 22% increase brand favorability. Audiences were also 60% more likely to consider purchasing from a brand that personalizes, and 73% more likely to pay attention to an ad personalized using AI.
Don’t fear the future
We’ve been here before. When desktop publishing arrived, marketers worried about the death of traditional design. When Photoshop launched, similar concerns surfaced. Today, these tools are fundamental to how we work—not because they replaced human creativity, but because they amplified it.
The AI wave follows the same trajectory but with even greater potential. By automating the time-consuming aspects of personalization and production, AI frees marketers to focus on what humans do best: developing strategic insights, crafting compelling narratives, and pushing creative boundaries. The question isn’t whether to embrace the change, but how quickly you can seize the opportunity.
