Students will understand how AI enables the creation and delivery of highly personalized creative content to individual users or micro-segments.
Key Ideas
The Evolution of Personalization
Mass Marketing: One message for everyone.
Segmented Marketing: Different messages for broad groups (e.g., demographics).
Personalized Marketing: Tailored messages for individuals, driven by data and AI.
How AI Powers Personalization
Dynamic Content Generation: AI can generate variations of text, images, or even video based on user data (e.g., location, past behavior, preferences).
Recommendation Engines: (e.g., Netflix, Amazon) - AI analyzes user history and preferences to suggest relevant content or products.
Adaptive User Interfaces: AI can modify the layout or content of a website/app based on individual user interaction patterns.
Hyper-Targeted Advertising: AI identifies specific individuals or very small groups most likely to respond to a particular message.
Creative Implications of Personalization
From Single Masterpiece to Modular Assets: Creatives need to think in terms of components (headlines, images, calls-to-action) that can be dynamically assembled by AI.
Testing and Optimization: AI allows for rapid A/B testing and multivariate testing of personalized content, quickly identifying what works best.
Maintaining Brand Consistency: A challenge in personalization is ensuring that while content is tailored, the core brand voice and visual identity remain consistent across all variations.
Ethical Considerations in Personalization
Privacy Concerns: Balancing personalization with user privacy and data security.
Filter Bubbles/Echo Chambers: AI can inadvertently limit exposure to diverse viewpoints if not carefully managed.
Transparency: Users should understand why they are seeing certain personalized content.
In-Lesson Activities
Personalized Ad Copy Challenge: Provide students with a product and three different audience segments (e.g., "young, tech-savvy," "budget-conscious parents," "luxury brand enthusiasts"). Using an LLM, have them generate personalized ad copy for each segment, highlighting how the language and focus change.
Modular Content Brainstorm: Choose a common piece of creative content (e.g., a social media ad for a new product). In groups, break it down into its modular components (headline, image, body copy, call-to-action). Brainstorm how AI could generate variations for each component based on different user data points.
Talking Points
"Personalization at scale is about having a million conversations, not one broadcast."
"AI allows us to move from 'one size fits all' to 'one size fits one' in our creative output."
"The creative challenge shifts from crafting a single perfect message to designing a system that can generate many perfect messages."