VP Marketing at Looper Insights. Writing about how AI is transforming marketing strategy, visibility, and long-term growth planning.
For nearly two decades, account‑based marketing (ABM) has been the darling of business-to-business (B2B) marketing. Entire teams, technologies and playbooks were reshaped to focus on high‑value accounts. On paper, it made sense: fewer accounts, more relevance, better return.
In practice, it rarely delivered.
Yes, it aligned sales and marketing. Yes, it pushed us to think beyond vanity metrics. But let’s be honest: most ABM was account‑based in name only. The output was rarely personal. At best, it was persona‑based. At worst, it was just another slide deck with a different logo slapped on the front.
We flooded inboxes with one‑pagers (that were never one page), teaser videos, decks, lightly customized demos and polite emails referencing a recent webinar. We told ourselves this was targeted. It wasn’t. It was templated.
Why? Because personalization at scale was too expensive, too clunky and too slow.
Then AI came along. And for once, the hype might actually hold up.
Personalization has always worked. We just never did it correctly.
McKinsey found that companies that excel at personalization drive 40% more revenue from those efforts than companies that don’t.
Salesforce reports that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their individual needs and expectations.
The evidence isn’t new. What is new is our ability to act on it without breaking teams or budgets.
Imagine what that means in practice. Just look at how video on demand (VOD) platforms have turned personalization into loyalty infrastructure. Disney+ applies machine learning to recommend not just titles but also collections that match household viewing habits and parental controls. Prime Video takes it further by blending personalization with shopping data from Amazon’s broader ecosystem, using behavioral inputs beyond just media consumption. In all three cases, personalization is not just about content discovery. It is the foundation for retention. When the experience feels custom-built, users stay longer even when the catalog doesn’t change.
At Looper Insights, I lead marketing for a platform that helps media companies see exactly how titles appear across hundreds of digital storefronts and streaming apps, TVs and set‑top boxes in over 30 countries.
The platform gives clients complete visibility into where their content sits on the screen and how algorithms decide prominence. Since its launch, the proprietary metric MPV™ has become a global standard for quantifying content placement value.
Clients use these insights to test what placement drives actual visibility and engagement, rather than guessing. They optimize placement that yields higher viewership, trading value for exposure and attention. That precise visibility quantification mimics personalization logic in marketing: attention is a scarce piece of real estate and worth fighting for.
Not persona‑based. Not role‑based. Person‑based.
AI gives us a realistic path to something we’ve long talked about but seldom delivered: individually relevant marketing.
Not “CTO role-based.” Not “enterprise persona.” Person‑based.
AI now allows dynamic creation of content capsules: videos, decks, emails and landing pages that reflect an individual’s tone, pain points, behavioral style and decision‑making cues. A proposal that speaks in my own voice. A follow‑up routine that lands exactly when I engage. A nurture journey built just for me.
These tools are fast enough and cheap enough to scale now.
It feels real because it is real, for me.
Still, it would be naive to ignore consumer concerns about AI-generated content. A recent study in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology found that when companies explicitly label content as AI-produced, some consumers report lower levels of trust and engagement. Beyond academia, cultural debates such as the so-called Dead Internet Theory reflect a wider anxiety that online spaces are becoming saturated with synthetic content that feels less human and less reliable.
These concerns are valid but they also highlight the distinction between AI content that is generic and disconnected and AI content that is designed to be relevant and useful. When it mirrors real needs, timing and tone, it does not diminish trust—it strengthens it.
The more tailored something is, the more we trust it.
Relevance builds trust. Trust drives action.
We’ve delivered generic funnels for years. AI lets us build marketing that feels like it was written just for one person because it really was. Research supports this shift. A 2025 study in Future Business Journal shows that personalized recommendations amplify trust and satisfaction and that personalization strengthens the relationship between trust and loyalty.
Whether that person knows the content was AI‑orchestrated won’t matter. If it lands at the right time, speaks their language and addresses what they care about, it will feel trustworthy. Because it is. And the better it knows me, the more likely I am to believe it can solve the problem I haven’t even articulated.
It’s not magic. Its relevance is taken seriously.
From data‑driven to empathy‑driven.
Yes, we still use intent data, firmographics and engagement indicators. But AI lets us convert signals into real empathy‑driven relevance. Not “this company might be in market.” “This person just hit pause on page four of your demo asset midday and is stuck.”
This is not speculative. Tools like Mutiny are serving personalized website layers in real time. Jasper and Copy.ai are generating outbound content aligned with buyer tone. Salesforce and Adobe are building adaptive nurture sequences built on behavior. These are early versions of what will soon feel normal.
Implementation is the only real bottleneck now and sophistication is advancing rapidly.
What’s next: Marketing teams in the AI era.
If AI can automate creation, targeting, testing and sequencing, then what remains for the marketing team?
In the next chapter, I’ll explore how AI is reshaping marketing org design and what the modern VP marketing role must evolve into. Less deck creator, more strategist. Less survival operator, more proactive orchestrator.
It’s not about replacing people. It’s about redefining what they’re here to do.
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