The end of mass marketing: towards an era of intelligent personalization

Discover how intelligent personalization is transforming digital marketing, putting an end to mass-market strategies in favor of tailor-made customer experiences.

We've all been there. An avalanche of push notifications, an inbox flooded with promotional emails and ads that seem to scream into the digital void. Marketing, in its quest to capture our attention, has often become a source of noise, interruptions and frustration. Generic messages ignore the unique and dynamic preferences of each user. You're offered a promotion for a product you've just bought. You're sent a notification in the middle of the night. As well as being ineffective, these strategies can be counter-productive, damaging the relationship between a brand and its customers.

The problem: out-of-date manual orchestration

Modern marketing, particularly customer relationship management (CRM), still relies heavily on manual systems and pre-established rules. Marketing teams, for all their talent and dedication, spend a considerable amount of time crudely segmenting their audience and manually orchestrating campaigns, severely limiting their ability to personalize the experience on an individual scale.

The result? Generic messages that ignore each user's unique and dynamic preferences. You're offered a promotion for a product you've just bought. You're sent a notification in the middle of the night. In addition to being ineffective, these strategies can be counter-productive, damaging the relationship between a brand and its customers. The challenge is immense: how to deliver the right message, on the right channel, at the right time, to millions of people simultaneously?

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16429

The agentic solution: a silent revolution

This is where the "agentic" approach proposed by the "Agentic Personalisation of Cross-Channel Marketing Experiences" report comes in. The term may sound technical, but the idea is powerful: delegate decision-making to intelligent, autonomous agents. Imagine an army of personal advisors, one for each user, learning and adapting in real time to create the most relevant experience possible.Howcausalinferencerevolutionizes marketing impact measurement

Their methodology rests on three ingenious pillars:

1. Causal inference to measure real impact: Rather than simply correlating a marketing action with a result, the system measures the "individual treatment effect" (ITE). In other words, it doesn't ask "did the users who received this message buy the product?", but rather "did this message cause the purchase?". To do this, he uses a sophisticated econometric model (Difference-in-Differences) that compares the evolution of the behavior of a user exposed to a message with that of a similar control group, thus isolating the real impact of the intervention.
2. Intelligent reinforcement learning (Thompson Sampling): To decide which action to take, the agents use an algorithm called Thompson Sampling. This is a proven way of managing the dilemma between "exploration" (testing new strategies to see what works) and "exploitation" (using strategies that have already proved successful). The agent therefore doesn't always choose the safest option, but takes calculated risks to continually refine its understanding of the user's preferences.
3. Putting people at the heart of the strategy: This is perhaps the most visionary aspect. This system is not designed to replace marketers, but to augment them. Professionals retain total control over creative elements: tone, value propositions, possible messages. Agents then operate autonomously within this human-defined framework, eliminating tedious orchestration work and freeing teams to focus on what they do best: strategy, creativity and deep customer understanding.

Results that speak for themselves

The theory is seductive, but the empirical results presented in the report are nothing short of astounding. The team conducted a large-scale controlled experiment on a multi-service application (combining, for example, VTC and meal delivery) with 6.4 million users over a three-week period.

The statistics are clear-cut. For four key functionalities of the application, the group of users benefiting from agentic personalization showed significant improvements over the control group.

Here are a few concrete examples from their results:

• Increased engagement (Intent): For one transactional feature, user interest jumped from +1.76% to +1.92%. For another, the increase was from +1.30% to +1.44%.
• Increase in conversion: Conversion for account creation increased from +0.21% to +0.25%.
• Direct commercial impact (GMV - Gross Merchandise Value): One feature saw its gross merchandise value increase from +14.12% to +22.62%. Another exploded, with an increase from +25.35% to +43.39%.

These percentages may seem modest at first glance, but on the scale of a 150-million-user base, where the system is now fully deployed, they represent colossal business impact and value creation.

Towards a more human and relevant brand-customer relationship

This report is much more than an academic publication. It's a manifesto for the future of marketing and, more broadly, for the future of digital interactions. We are at the dawn of a paradigm shift, from marketing that shouts to marketing that listens.

This technology isn't about sending more messages, it's about sending the right message. It respects the user's time and attention by presenting only what's relevant to them, at that precise moment. It's the promise of a calmer, more useful and, ultimately, more human digital experience.

Far from the alarmist rhetoric about AI replacing jobs, this project perfectly illustrates the model of human-machine collaboration. By automating repetitive and complex tasks, AI frees up human potential. Tomorrow's marketers won't be campaign operators, but experience architects, strategists and creatives whose intuition and empathy will be amplified, not replaced, by the machine.

Of course, such personalizing power raises essential ethical questions about privacy and manipulation. However, the "human-in-the-loop" approach described here offers an indispensable safeguard, ensuring that technology remains at the service of humans and respects predefined rules.

In conclusion, this report shows us a future where technology creates relevance, not distance. A future where every interaction is an opportunity to delight rather than interrupt the user. A future where marketing, at last, becomes a service. And it's a future that's not just inspiring, it's already here.