For the organizations that manage to effectively integrate production and DAM, tasks such as variant creation for different channels, regions or countries are no longer manual, and the days of designers hand-crafting each individual asset for particular markets or consumer groups become a thing of the past.

From its vast experience, ICP has seen that mass personalization at scale requires more of teams. Unfortunately, the sting is that enterprises’ investment in this space isn’t keeping pace with the needs of content creation and production. There’s an imperative that production teams find ever more efficient ways to implement the models that adapt and deliver more for less, and quickly.

Both agencies and enterprises need to re-think the way they are creating content at the source. We’re still in a world where everything is freshly baked. We haven’t yet adapted to rapidly localize advertising. But in order to scale, we need to move beyond the ‘here’s something we made last year, let’s just update it’. Presently, the way of working isn’t to re-cycle -- rather, it’s to do the 400th shot of the product. They’re making the mistake of not looking in the fridge before going to the store to buy more food.

The new, more scalable, and sustainable future is focused on the re-use and re-purposing of high-quality assets. Its also focused on content modularity - whereby content snippets can easily be re-purposed and re-used across channels. While more innovative brands and agencies have begun to create technology ecosystems that give them the insight to serve up proven, successful assets alongside content that’s personalized, most are in the very early stages. What’s holding many brands back is the mental shift.